The Rise of Rhythm Studies

Subtitle
Mediating Dimension, Discipline, and Scale

Rhythm is everywhere. Its ability to focus and unify interdisciplinary conversation begs the questions: What is rhythm and can different disciplines agree on its definition?

Rhythm studies have emerged as a key background form traversing cultural, natural, and social forms like cognition, communication, and even cosmology. An added boon: this background can seem unifying. Those who explore such entangled phenomena study the throbbing presence of rhythmic, oscillatory, and vibratory potentials: Neuroscientists turn to rhythm for novel explanations of why our cognitive capacities are so limited; physicists use it to cross time and space; scholars in various fields turn to it to rethink materialism and affect theory.

This lively collection considers why rhythm currently functions as a form of mediation between disciplines, across widely different scales and dimensions. "The Rise of Rhythm Studies" tests what rhythm can do through theoretical examinations and in case studies ranging from European literature to topology and media studies to Chinese visual art. Established scholars, such as Nina Kraus, Anna Gibbs, and Caroline Levine, alongside rising scholars in the field, marshal transdisciplinary perspectives in order to understand rhythm as a boundary condition for living in and working through and with the world.

Bio

Mark Lussier is a professor emeritus of English at Arizona State University.

Praise for this book

This highly interesting book promotes rhythm studies as a much-needed discipline of its own. It explains why rhythm is a main determinant in brain research as well as in Taoism, in aesthetic analyses and in the understanding of social phenomena.

Eva Lilja Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Eventually, one way or another, rhythm gets to you (even if you feel that you don't have a sense of rhythm). Rhythm insinuates. It aggregates and disaggregates – sometimes subtly, sometimes shatteringly. Moving across a range of disciplines, this collection operates similarly: at once subtle and shattering.

Gregory J. Seigworth Professor of Digital Communication and Cultural Studies, Millersville University, USA