Keynote Address

Yopie Prins (Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan) | bio
"Robert Browning, Transported by Meter"
Friday, October 28, 4:30 – 6:00 pm
SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street): Theatre 1700

This paper considers the work of Robert Browning in the age of mechanical reproduction, surveying various technologies of transport to demonstrate how Browning is transported into modernity: typographically, photographically, phonographically, musically, and cinematically. After interrogating several attempts to reproduce the authorial voice of Browning (in print, in pictures, in sound recording), I focus more specifically on the free-floating figure of voice in a poem from "Pippa Passes." I show how this lyric (already a figure for lyric circulation) circulated in nineteenth-century America: in a railway edition printed for train travellers in Chicago, in a musical setting composed by Amy Beach, and in a silent film directed by D. W. Griffith. I argue that the remediation of Browning's poetry can be understood metrically, as forms of spatialization and syncopation already implicit in his complex meters. Thus Browning (affectionately dubbed "Old Hippety-Hop o' the Accents" by Ezra Pound) anticipates the prosody of a new age.

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