Rhyme’s Crimes
This article shows how rhyme came to be devalued critically. It argues that formalist methodologies alone cannot explain why rhyme once dominated and then fell in importance. Nor can formalism save rhyme by pointing to the reasons why humans enjoy it or by showing how it adds to poetry’s value. Instead, in historicist fashion, I focus on how political factors have determined the meaning of rhyme in the last three hundred years. I link rhyme’s fall to a series of ideological disavowals that tied the technique to subject positions deemed unfree. From political conservatism and aristocracy to femininity, childishness, and popular vulgarity, rhyme was positioned in aesthetic discourse as a device not fit for liberal professors of poetry. The case of rhyme illustrates that literary form can never be abstracted from the political contests by which culture is riven.
Rhyme and Reason in John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language Scheme
John Wilkins (1614–1672) popularized Galilean astronomy in England and helped found the Royal Society. In An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), the early Royal Society’s most important work on language, Wilkins tried to invent a language based on and adequate to the new science. He created hundreds of pages of encyclopedic taxonomy that approximated the order of nature and then assigned words to things based on their place in this taxonomy. The goal was a language that would be isomorphic with reality. Significantly, this language worked through something like rhyme. Wilkins said so much explicitly: words “of an agreeable or opposite sense” should “hav[e] somewhat correspondent in” their “sounds” or written “Marks.” Similar things should be expressed with similar words. Scholarship has not done justice to Wilkins’s rhymes. The pervasive scholarly commonplaces are, rather, that Wilkins wanted to “degrad[e]” language, subjugate it to total human control, or make it disappear. Such interpretation has a long history. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) mocked insane universal language projectors set on “entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever” for hauling around humungous “Bundle[s] of Things” to use in lieu of language, and still today we hear that Wilkins and other writers of the new science wanted words to be “transparent representations of things,” an aim that required words’ “own thinglike or sensible properties” to “be overlooked” or downplayed. Wilkins’s privileging of
Introduction to Dutch Law for Foreign Lawyers
Part 1 Dutch legal system: history sources judicial organization legal education and the legal profession classification. Part 2 Private law: family law property law law of obligations representation and procuration legal persons law of succession commercial law air law civil procedure private international law. Part 3 Public law: constitutional law administrative law criminal justice system tax law economic law. Part 4 Labour law. Part 5 Legal philosophy.