Title: Introduction to Rhyme: Its History and Theory
Abstract: Introduction to Rhyme: Its History and TheoryThe present book was written some fifty years ago. It belongs to the heyday of Russian Formalism, even though by then I was critically opposed to the dogmas of rigid formalism. Thus, at issue in the book is not formalism as a scientific theory, but rather problems of form, particularly those problems that are indispensable for the analysis and interpretation of poetry. Such problems of form make up just one part of the interpretation of the poetic whole, but they will consistently be treated as an expression of meaningful content. Rhyme also belongs to the expressive forms of poetry; through its relation to the whole, rhyme becomes an important element of a text's poetic style and thereby achieves its special status and its meaning in the system of its linguistic means of expression.The basic idea of the book is summarized in its introductory chapter. The schoolbook theory understands rhyme as the complete phonetic identity from the final stressed syllable to the end of the line in two or more lines of verse. This traditional conception thereby treats the typical form of so-called end rhyme (tocnaja konecnaja rifma) of recent times. In contrast to this, I understand rhyme as every phonetic repetition (zvukovoj povtor) that claims a functional (in other words, structural) meaning in the metrical composition of a poem.1 From a phonetic perspective rhyme can represent a complete or partial repetition of sound, depending on the predominant artistic norm; it appears as alliteration or assonance, as consonance or vocalic harmony. It does not always stand at the end of the line: one finds initial rhyme alongside end rhyme, and internal (middle) rhyme, even though the placement at the end of a line claims greater compositional meaning, since end rhyme designates (serves as a marker of) the line's boundary, and likewise its structural relationship to the remaining lines (the stanzaic structure).This broad conception allows us to pursue the phonetic processes of canonization and decanonization (kanonizacija i dekanonizacija) of pure rhyme in its historical course. The older-especially folk-stages of classical literatures2 commonly show different forms of impure rhyme; but modern poetry also delights in using these same means to produce a desired phonetic dissonance (similar to modern music). It was precisely this varied use of impure rhyme in contemporary poetry (Aleksandr Blok, Mayakovsky) that prompted me to revise the dominant theory of rhyme.Since this general conception accounts not only for rhyme's classical, complete, and finished forms, but also its incomplete embryological primary stages {embrional'naja rifma'j, it is possible to pursue the emergence and early development of rhyme in modern European languages. It certainly cannot be denied that external impulses and influences have played a role that should not be overlooked (such as the influence of medieval Latin liturgical verse on the rhymed gospels of Otfrid and his followers), but the spontaneous development in the same direction [toward a more regular rhyme], principally from older forms of rhythmic-syntactic parallelism, is no less important. ***To examples from Russian bylina-which, as will be shown, contain on average over thirty per cent of mostly embryonic rhymes (which earlier research had overlooked)-is added a similar development of rhyme in Old Turkish epic folk poetry.3 ***On this basis, I attempt to develop a comparative historical theory of rhyme as an otherwise neglected part of a general comparative historical theory of verse. The subject matter discussed is, first and foremost, the history of Russian verse; and indeed, not only because the work was first intended for the Russian reader, but also because the Russian language, due to its polysyllabism and its free accent, offers the greatest abundance of verse and rhyme forms. Indeed, the Russian context presents only one point of departure for a historical account that compares similar or different verse forms in other modern European languages, most importantly: German, English, French, and Italian. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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