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Featured researches published by Jason David Hall.


Archive | 2017

Measurement, Temporality, Abstraction

Jason David Hall

This Chapter reads the New Prosody’s emphasis on abstraction and proportionate spacing (namely its promotion of meter as a series of “isochronous intervals”) as correlates of the standardizing impulses of two iconic Victorian machines: the railway and the telegraph. Their assertion of standard measurement, regularly recurring marks or beats, and forms of symbolic abstraction exerted a pervasive machine logic that echoes the presiding features of Patmore’s temporal metrics. Not only did these machine conglomerations provide a set of almost unavoidable material experiences with which an emerging metrical theory might achieve a powerful resonance, but that theory, as it gathered momentum over the course of the century, so conditioned poets’ rhythmic perception as to produce metrical consternation when confronted by other distinctive beat signatures offered by contemporary devices—in particular ones with an apparently irregular or imperceptibly fast engine cadence. While some machines beat in time with the metrics of the New Prosody, others seemed to have no discernible “metrical” organization at all.


Archive | 2017

The Automatic Flow of Verse

Jason David Hall

This Chapter assesses meter in relation to contemporary thinking about the “man-machine.” In particular, it shows how meter in the nineteenth century became a topic of interest to phrenologists, physiologists, physicians, and surgeons, who assessed metrical ability and deficiency from the perspective of their specialist fields. Their pronouncements about meter—often grounded in the materiality of the body or the embodied mind—advanced a new vocabulary and disciplinary frameworks for engaging with question about prosodic agency and volition, as well as organic metrical determinism. Not only was versification considered by some a “mechanical” practice that might have little to do with genius or a predisposition to rhythmical composition; further, it might be the consequence of “mechanistic” or “automatic” somatic and cognitive processes. While some saw meter as a measure of a person’s ability to impose his or her will over the unruly forces of the body—for example, exercises in spoken scansion might effectively enable one to govern the tongue and other elements of the “speech mechanism”—others, in particular advocates of an increasingly materialist agenda, suggested that meter, along with other human linguistic capacities, might in some cases be a manifestation of the body’s or brain’s mechanics: an individual’s respiratory rhythms, as Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted, or cerebral health, as postulated by Frederic Bateman and other physicians, might have more to do with his or her versified speech than any conscious thought process or formal training in metrics.


Archive | 2013

Introduction: Decadent Poetics

Alex Murray; Jason David Hall

The term decadence—designating variously a literary form, a movement, and a period of literary history—is notoriously hard to pin down. It derives from the Latin decadere, a ‘falling down’ or ‘falling away’, and the OEDgives the following definition: ‘The process of falling away or declining (from a prior state of excellence, vitality, prosperity, etc.); decay; impaired or deteriorated condition.’1 In Decadent Style(1985) John R. Reed suggests that we need to avoid using the term in the lower case, referring as it does to ‘all those carelessly defined manifestations of change that inspired anxiety and depression in the second half of the last century’.2 Yet the proximity to ideas of decline and falling away is, in many ways, what gives decadenceits semantic force, being both a term of opprobrium (connoting linguistic and moral decay) andthe ‘transvaluation’ (to use Nietzsche’s term) of the moral framework that allows for simplistic ideas of decay to circulate. The poetic is an integral part of this transvaluation, the literary text performing the de construc- tion of meaning and value. It was this point that Oscar Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, made in his lecture ‘There Is No Decay’, which he gave to the Bluecoat School, Liverpool, in February 1908. Ross declares that ‘what is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development’.3 He goes on to explain of decadence that ‘even if we accept Mr Balfour’s definition of its symptom—“the employment of an over-wrought technique”—we must remember that Decadence and Decay have now different meanings, though originally they meant the same sort of thing’.4


Archive | 2011

Meter matters : verse cultures of the long nineteenth century

Jason David Hall


Archive | 2007

Seamus Heaney : poet, critic, translator

A. B. Crowder; Jason David Hall


Archive | 2013

Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle

Alex Murray; Jason David Hall


Archive | 2009

Seamus Heaney's rhythmic contract

Jason David Hall


Nineteenth-Century Literature | 2007

Popular Prosody: Spectacle and the Politics of Victorian Versification

Jason David Hall


Victorian Poetry | 2011

Materializing Meter: Physiology, Psychology, Prosody

Jason David Hall


Literature Compass | 2009

Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre Matters Cluster

Jason David Hall

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Alex Murray

Queen's University Belfast

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