Polyrhythmicity in Language, Music and Society Complex Time Relations in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

This book addresses the complex time relations that occur in some types of jazz and classical music, as well as in the novel, plays and poetry. It discusses these multiple levels of rhythm from a social science as well as an arts and humanities perspective. Building on his ground-breaking work in Re-framing Literacy, A Prosody of Free Verse and Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics, the author explores the world of multiple- or poly-rhythms in music, literature and the social sciences. He reveals that multi-layered rhythms are uncommon and little researched. Nevertheless, they are important to the experience of art and social situations, not least because they link physicality to feeling and to decision-making (timing), as well as to aesthetic experience. Whereas most poly-rhythmic relations are felt unconsciously, this book reveals the complex patterning that underpins the structures of feeling and of experience.

1. Introduction.- 2. The Nature of Multiple- and Poly-rhythms.- 3. Polyrhythmicity in Time: an International Perspective.- 4. Polyrhythmicity in Music.- 5. Polyrhythmicity in Conversation and Speech Prosodies.- 6. Polyrhythmicity in Poetry.- 7. Polyrhythmicity in the Novel.- 8. Polyrhythmicity in Social Situations.- 9. Polyrhythmicity in Contemporary Hybrid Culture.- 10. Polyrhythmicity in the Asia Pacific Region.- 11. Researching Polyrhythmicity.- 12. Polyrhythmicity in Rhetoric, Learning and Education.

Richard Andrews worked in Hong Kong in the 1980s as Head of English, Drama and English-as-a-Second Language in an international school. Since then he has travelled extensively in mainland China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan. He is author of several books for Routledge, including Argumentation in Higher Education (2009), Re-framing Literacy (2010), A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (2014), A Prosody of Free Verse (2016) and Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics (2018). He was winner of the Edwin Hopkins award (National Council for Teachers of English) for an article on democracy and argument in Chicago in 1996, and his 2016 and 2018 books for Routledge have been given the highest rating by external assessors in the field of English Language & Literature and the Social Sciences in the build-up to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (2021). He is co-series editor for Cambridge University Press of its Cambridge School Shakespeare series, currently being published in a new edition in China. He is currently Professor in Education and an member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.