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Notes Preface 1. Novalis, Novalis Werke, 464. On the—impossibly broad—topic of changes in historical consciousness, see in particular Koselleck, Futures Past; Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. 2. Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 90. 3. Ibid., 94. 4. For Franco Moretti, it is “prose as work, and, more precisely, as work of analysis” that embodies the spirit of the nineteenth century as a “serious century.” He suggests that prose became the symbolic form of the bourgeois century by enabling the stylistic achievements of the novel of the nineteenth century: extended description and free indirect discourse. Moretti, “Serious,” 382. 5. Ginsburg and Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” 245, 253. 6. The most salient way of linking back would be prose rhythm as described by Werner Krauss. Krauss, Grundprobleme, 41–42. 7. Ginsburg and Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” 257. In an earlier— perhaps more quirky—version of the argument, Viktor Shklovskii describes the rhythm of prose as a force that can propel a worker or a walker forward, since “it is easier to walk with music than without it. Of course, it is just as easy to walk while talking up a storm, when the act of walking disappears from our consciousness. In this sense, the rhythm of prose is important as a factor leading to automatization.” Paradoxically, Shklovskii describes continuity— the avoidance of pauses or interruptions—as the closest parallel of the strictly ordered interruptions that form the rhythm of a work or a marching song. For him, this explains the force of prose to carry forward not only the legs of a walker but also the energy of a narrative. Shklovskii, Theory of Prose, 14. For Shklovskii, artistic prose is distinguished precisely by its disruption of the continuous rhythm, but he leaves the mechanics of this disruption unexplicated. Another twentieth-century scholar who comments on the continuous rhythm of prose is Northrop Frye; for him “the rhythm of prose is continuous, not recurrent, and the fact is symbolized by the purely mechanical breaking of prose lines on a printed page.” Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 263. See also Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 164–66. Werner Krauss gives a simple and illuminating exposition of prose rhythm and of its persistence in modern prose. Krauss, Grundprobleme, 41–42. 8. Prorsa, then, might be the mother-goddess of what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” the birth of every human as the advent of something entirely new in the world. In a related vein, Gary Saul Morson uses the term “prosaics” to describe an openness to the contingencies of the future and to the freedom 160 Notes to Pages xiv–xv inherent in human existence in time. This concept of prosaics was first put forward by Morson and Caryl Emerson in their work on Bakhtin. There, they define prosaics as a “philosophy of the ordinary and the messy.” Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 23. Morson elaborates the concept of prosaics, focusing it on an anti-deterministic understanding of temporality that emphasizes freedom and the existence of alternative possibilities (what he calls sideshadowing). Morson, Narrative and Freedom. See also the discussion between Morson, Thomas Pavel, Caryl Emerson, and Michael André Bernstein in New Literary History: Pavel, “Freedom, from Romance to the Novel”; Morson, “Contingency”; Morson, “Sideshadowing and Tempics”; Bernstein, “Keeping the Conversation Going: Prosaics and Literary Theory.” Since I focus on space in my analysis of prose, it is worth noting that Morson has argued against the spatializing of texts that is inherent to structural analysis insofar as it perceives all of the parts of the text as simultaneous; however, in what follows I arrive at a spatial conception of the text from a different direction, as a feature of the pragmatic conditions that define different modes and genres. 9. This assumption is the foundation of a number of studies of the emergence of prose, for example: Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence of Prose; Spiegel, Romancing the Past; Stempel, “Die Anfänge der romanischen Prosa im XIII. Jahrhundert.” 10. Quoted in Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 98. 11. The Latin—“tota scriptura trahit originem a prosa. Nam rithmi et metra sunt mendicata suffragia, que a prosa originem trahunt”—is quoted in Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 57. 12.Vico writes in the Scienca Nuova (1725),it is a“necessity of human nature” that “poetic style took place before prose style.” Quoted in De Gennaro,“Croce and Vico.” A similar perception of the primacy of poetic speech to prose recurs in Klopstock’s Von der Sprache der Poesie...

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