Introduction to Laura Marcus, Rhythm: The Measure of the Modern

ABSTRACT

This Introduction to Laura Marcus's final monumental but unfinished work describes her wholly new understanding of the central importance of rhythm across the arts and sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The turn to rhythm was formative in many fields and comprehended poetry, music, dance, sculpture, painting, photography, film, gymnastics, physics, education, psychology, physiology, thinking about race, class and gender, the past and the future, tradition and change. From wave theory to orthography rhythm shaped creative thought. We summarise the existing six chapters out of what were to be eight. 1. The discourses of wave theory. 2. Rhythm in modernity – aesthetics and science. 3. Dance theories of Steiner and Dalcroze – social and physiological. 4. Rhythm theory in modernist avant-garde periodicals. 5. The Bloomsbury Group, Frye and Woolf. 6. The cultural and political turn to native American rhythm.

KEYWORDS:

• Wave
• the body
• science
• aesthetics
• dance
• organic rhythm
• factory rhythm race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 33.

2 Roger Icart, Abel Gance, ou, Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: l’Age d’homme, 1983), p. 131, qtd. in and trans. Laura Marcus, ‘The Rhythm of the Rails: Sound and Locomotion’, in Julian Murphet et al. (eds.), Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 208.

3 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 38. The work probably dates to the 50s BCE.