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SUMMARY:Evolution of the Poetic Canon in the Princeton Prosody Archive (15
 32-1929). Turnover and Continuity.
DTSTART:20260618T120000Z
DTEND:20260619T210000Z
UID:https://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2026/06/evolution-of-the-poetic-canon
 -in-the-princeton-prosody-archive-1532-1929-turnover-and-continuity/
DESCRIPTION:\n\n  Poetry’s afterlife often begins when its lines are cal
 led into service. In the instructional world of prosody and elocution\, po
 ets and poems become examples: quotable pieces of literary evidence throug
 h which knowledge about poetry is made teachable. With more than 7\,000 te
 xts published between 1532 and 1929\, the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA) 
 preserves the long and uneven history of this instructional tradition\, fr
 om pronunciation guides and rhetorical treatises to schoolbooks and works 
 of literary instruction. It offers a way to study canon formation not only
  through what was admired or preserved\, but through what teachers\, criti
 cs\, and theorists found useful.This paper uses the PPA to study canonizat
 ion as a process of pedagogical anchoring: the making of poetic authority 
 through use. Poets move through the archive at different speeds and with d
 ifferent degrees of durability. Some become stable reference points\, invo
 ked repeatedly as instruments for explaining poetic form. Others appear on
 ly briefly\, tied to a particular moment\, topic\, or instructional need\,
  before disappearing from view. At the level of poems\, this movement is m
 ore fragmented: works enter prosodic instruction as lines\, couplets\, phr
 ases\, or metrical specimens\, detached from their original settings and m
 ade to serve local explanatory purposes. Some become reservoirs of quotabl
 e lines\, repeatedly broken into examples\; others survive only as fleetin
 g acts of citation. Combining large-scale corpus analysis\, text-reuse met
 hods\, and probabilistic modelling\, we trace canonization in this record 
 of poetic exemplarity as a historical process: the gradual making\, unmaki
 ng\, and remaking of the poets and poems through which poetry itself was t
 aught.\n\n\nhttps://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2026/06/evolution-of-the-poet
 ic-canon-in-the-princeton-prosody-archive-1532-1929-turnover-and-continuit
 y/
LOCATION:TU Darmstadt\, Germany
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