Le Vers francais: Histoire, theorie, esthetique.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 Modern Humanities Research Association

Le Vers francais: Histoire, theorie, esthetique. Ed. by MICHEL MURAT. (Metrique francaise comparee, 2) Paris: Champion. 2000. 411 pp. 450 F.

Metrics is characteristically beset by two anxieties: the need to constitute itself as a unified and rigorous discipline (= body of knowledge + analytical methodology), and the need to achieve this by an equally rigorous exclusion of, and/or self-exclusion from, other close-lying disciplines. These anxieties only too frequently beget fruitless internecine struggles between contending metrical persuasions, and a perverse thrusting away of those considerations which would seem to have a symbiotic relationship with metrics: scansional methods (verse instance v. verse design), paralinguistics (delivery instance and delivery design), experimental phonetics, literary interpretation. Additionally, terminological and taxonomic fortifications are developed which not only spread confusion, but prove rebarbative to the wrong enemy, the reader looking for help. To the liberal bystander, the attempt to create an authoritative orthodoxy must seem peculiarly misguided, partly because of the lessons of...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.