From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imaginationand how that imagination, in turn, responded.
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'Christian R. Gelder's erudite and limpid study of aspirations toward a science of verse provides an intellectual history and a critique of ideology that should be of great interest to scholars of modernist poetics-but it also gives us much more. By showing how poets not only went beyond but worked through this positivist program, Gelder makes a dialectically compelling case for the specific forms of knowledge only poetry can construct.' Nathan Brown, Centre for Expanded Poetics, Concordia University 'Christian R. Gelder's account of the modernists who wanted to put poetics on a scientific footing - and the ways their own poems resisted them - is fascinating. The accurate, objective measurement of poetic effect, he shows, was more than a cranky dream of linguistic programmability; it became a significant creative spur for Williams, Riding, Oppen and Forrest-Thompson, and a touchstone for I. A. Richards. This history of the scientific aspirations behind close reading and literary labs is also a subtle and discerning account of the poems and their poets.' Peter Howarth, Queen Mary, University of London
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Offers a groundbreaking history of scientific reading and its impact on the epistemology and politics of modern poetry.
Preface: the normal scientific study of poetry;
1. William Carlos
Williams, measurement and the origins of distant reading;
2. Laura Riding's
exactitude;
3. The method wars;
4. The birth of close reading: instruments in
I. A. Richards and Veronica Forrest-Thomson; Coda: machine learning and the
history of style.
Christian R. Gelder is a Research Fellow in Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Literature and Medicine, Psychoanalysis and History, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, he is the co-author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
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