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In American poetics, lyric and rhythm share a history—and since this is America, it is a racialized history. This essay considers Francis Barton Gummere’s contributions to that history. Although most Anglo-American literary critics have never heard of Gummere, many of the assumptions of that criticism were first articulated by him between 1891 and 1911. By returning to Gummere’s now historically obscure logic, we might begin to trace the overdetermined origins of current critical versions of lyric rhythm as natural culture and to imagine an alternative history of American poetics, a history of the poetics of rhythm not modeled on naturalized (and thus racialized) concepts of culture, on English prosody, or on common sense; an alternative that acknowledges the contradictions of any notion of a shared Anglo-American rhythm or shared Anglo-American poetry, a history in which the idea of rhythm remains central, but central as symptom rather than central as solution.

The Introduction explains why the need for a new theoretical framework for the study of Arabic literature is so urgent. Its main outlines are based on the theoretical achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian Formalism and its theoretical legacy. The basic assumption is that all potential inventories of canonized and non-canonized Arabic literary texts ― including children’s literature and translated texts ― are to be seen as forming one dynamic, autonomous literary system.

Academic scholarship has usually explored family films in terms of authenticity and memory, framing them as spontaneous documents of everyday life, and valued as catalysts for acts of reminiscence or confirmations of kinship. Any status they might have as crafted stories has, for the most part, been ignored. The fictional character of family films has been largely confined to a sense that they present us with ‘idealised’ moments of life, rather than any more verifiable ‘truth’. This chapter approaches family filmmaking in relation to fiction, in a rather different way, in what could probably best be described as a quest for the ‘historical poetics’ of a lost sub-genre. Unlike family footage in general, ‘family fiction’ explicitly employs strategies of staging, acting and directing, and is frequently based on a prepared script. When and under what circumstances (technological, cultural, social) family fiction was regarded as an appropriate genre for hobby filmmakers, forms a core concern throughout this chapter. The chapter argues that such works should be of interest to any amateur film collection, not due to some supposed ‘authenticity’ or ‘uniqueness’, but as evidences of the way in which cinematic techniques and styles were appropriated by amateurs, and thus extended the cinematographic experience from movie theatres into the daily life of moviegoers.

Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.