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Unparalleled Poetry disentangles biblical poetry from parallelism and meter and provides an account of the free-rhythm versification system of biblical poetry. This cognitive approach is oriented toward how poetic structure can be heard and perceived, and it illuminates both the structures of biblical poetry and the artistry of potential effects.
List of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction by Margaret H. Freeman
- Abbreviations and Symbols
- PART I: INTRODUCTORY MATTERS
- Chapter 1: Unparalleling Biblical Poetry
- Chapter 2: A Preliminary Description of Biblical Verse
- Chapter 3: The Nature of the Biblical Hebrew Poetic Line
- PART II: GESTALT PRINCIPLES: EMERGENCE OF BIBLICAL POETIC STRUCTURE
- Chapter 4: Perceptual Organization and the Law of Simplicity, Proximity and Similarity
- Chapter 5: Symmetry, Balance and Imbalance
- Chapter 6: Good Continuation, Closure, Requiredness, and Principled Lineations
- PART III: REMAINING ISSUES
- Chapter 7: Integration and Unintegrated Lines, Rhythm in Lamentations, and Line Length Constraints
- Chapter 8: Biblical Poetry and Prose
- Chapter 9: Conclusion: Unparalleled Poetry
- References
- Index
About the author
Emmylou J. Grosser, PhD, is a Research Fellow for the Department of Hebrew, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. Her research interests include the language and literature of the Hebrew Bible and interdisciplinary approaches to biblical poetry.
Summary
For more than 250 years, biblical Hebrew poetry scholarship has been dominated by metrical assumptions and the idea of parallelism. While a consensus is emerging that biblical poetry is not metrical, no consensus has arisen regarding what parallelism is, or what makes biblical poetry "verse" or "poetry" in the absence of meter, graphical lineation, and end-marking of lines.
Unparalleled Poetry claims that a new paradigm for biblical poetry is needed, a paradigm that is disentangled from parallelism as well as meter. Drawing from the Cognitive Poetics work of Reuven Tsur, Emmylou Grosser reorients the discussion of biblical poetic structure to how poetic structure can be heard and perceived. She argues that the line-units of biblical poetry emerge in the cognitive experience of the listener/reader and provides an account of the free-rhythm versification system of biblical poetry.
Grosser's cognitive approach to biblical poetry accounts for the wide diversity of lines and poems in the Bible and illuminates both the structures of biblical poetry and the artistry of potential effects. Unparalleled Poetry presents a rewarding new paradigm for readers of the Bible, while modeling new possibilities for the study of nonmetrical poetries and phenomena called "parallelism" throughout the world.
Additional text
Grosser's model remedies the previous ill-treatment of reducing poetic lines to any given structure or restricted linguistic aspect. An unparalleled approach indeed.
