Caesura
A caesura is a pause or break in a line of poetry, often marked by punctuation or a natural rhythm, which creates a sense of rhythm and emphasis. It can occur at a regular or irregular interval within a line and is used to add dramatic or emotional impact to the verse. In literature, caesuras help to control the pacing and flow of the poem.
4 Key excerpts on "Caesura"
eBook - ePubMusic as Philosophy
Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style
- Michael Spitzer(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Indiana University Press(Publisher)
...We should start with the philosophical definition of Caesura Hölderlin gives in his Anmerkungen zum Ödipus, an interpretation which moves well beyond Caesura’s conventional poetic function as a break between words in a metrical foot, or a pause near the middle of a line. The passage reads: For the tragic transport is actually empty, and the least restrained.—Thereby, in the rhythmic sequence of the representations wherein the transport presents itself, there becomes necessary what in poetic meter is called Caesura, the pure word, the counterrhythmic rupture—namely, in order to meet the onrushing change of representations at its highest point, in such a manner that not the change of representation but the representation itself very soon appears. (in Benjamin 2002, vol. 1: 340–41) Benjamin provides the most famous reading of this passage, embedded in his great essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (2002: 297–362). For Benjamin, Hölderlin’s Caesura is the expressionless (das Ausdrucklose) moment of sublime violence which interrupts a tragedy, as in Tiresias’s intervention in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. It is an expressly rhythmic device (Hölderlin’s “counter-rhythmic rupture”), albeit at several orders of abstraction: thinking of drama as a kind of “rhythm,” and of the interruption of a rhythmic sequence (the “onrushing change of representations”) as itself “rhythmic.” Adorno, confusingly, translates Hölderlin’s Caesura to Beethoven in two opposite senses. On the one hand, he identifies the Caesura as a particular moment in Beethoven’s sonata forms, located in the turning point between what he calls the “descending” and “ascending” curves of his two-part model of the development section, according to Hölderlin’s “calculable law of tragedy” (64)...
eBook - ePub- Parthenope Bion Talamo(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Otherwise, another obvious physical manifestation of the Caesura, such as fainting, for example, may be perceived as a passage in the opposite direction: from the light and sounds of the world to the sound of blood pulsing in the ears, silence and darkness. Let us take a step back for a moment. What is the Caesura? What did this term mean originally? What did Freud mean by it? Or at least, what degree of importance does this term have in its context? The definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, referring to Greek and Latin prose and poetry, describes it as a division in metric verses while, referring to English writings, it adds that the pause or the interval are connected to the meaning of the words. A more general definition indicates the Caesura as a synonym for interruption, interval, leaving aside the idea that it should be, or could be, significant. The Freudian quotation (1925) that mentions the Caesura, and which inspired Bion, says the following: “There is much more continuity between intrauterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive Caesura of the act of birth would have us believe.” Bion plumbs this concept at the end of a brief essay entitled “Caesura”: There is much more continuity between autonomically appropriate quanta and the waves of conscious thought and feeling than the impressive Caesura of transference and counter-transference would have us believe. So …? Investigate the Caesura; not the analyst; not the analysand; not the unconscious; not the conscious; not sanity; not insanity. But the Caesura, the link, the synapse, the (counter) transference, the transitive-intransitive mood. (Bion, 1977) So we may note that Bion has taken and broadened the idea, only implicit in the use that Freud has made of it, that the Caesura is important in itself, and not only the idea that there is a continuity in both its sides...
eBook - ePubExplorations in Bion's 'O'
Everything We Know Nothing About
- Afsaneh K. Alisobhani, Glenda J. Corstorphine, Afsaneh K. Alisobhani, Glenda J. Corstorphine(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Caesura (in Greek and Latin verse) refers, of course, to a break between words within a metrical foot, or in modern verse, a pause near the middle of a line (Oxford English Dictionary). He quotes Freud to make his point about the impressive Caesura of birth and the continuity of our experience at the beginning of his lecture. “There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life than the impressive Caesura of the act of birth would have us believe”. From: The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1926). This “Caesura” is more about the seismic, poetic “pause” between intrauterine life and birth. Bion transcends the idea/belief that this is an unbreachable gap. He thinks aloud about how to reach across this pause in our experience. What he is prescribing is a careful emptiness, “without memory or desire” and perhaps, even without the distinct awareness of life before birth vs. life after birth. It is a pause, albeit, an impressive one, as Bion, and Freud, before him, articulated. This Caesura also provides the pause for the analyst and patient to develop the capacity for thinking while experiencing emotional turmoil. My experience of using Bion’s guidance in this manner has led me to the fleeting, transcendental nature of what psychoanalysis holds for the patient and the analyst who can approach this careful emptiness: Bion’s Kantian conception of “O”. In this unique communication, he articulates two impressive observations. The first is that there is normal splitting in the primordial world of the womb where the “muchness” we share with all the other animals cannot be fathomed by the fetus and he must break it into “packets”. The second notion is a prescription of technique: “To have a hallucination may be the only way the analyst who is not too difficult to reach” may reach the patient who is very “difficult to reach” (Bion, 1975). Bion makes note of the importance of theory but also emancipates psychoanalysis from theory alone...
eBook - ePubBion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life
Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis
- Avner Bergstein(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 2 Transcending the Caesura Reverie, dreaming, and counterdreaming A very bright and isolated 11-year-old boy in analysis spoke of the various monsters in the playroom, those from “Here”, those from “There”, and the ones that came from “Somewhere”. These creatures from “Somewhere”, he said, could not hear the ones from “Here” or from “There”… I would like to consider the way one might move within the space, or the gap, between two minds, and meet the psyche of an other. How can we get in touch with a patient’s mind, at times so ‘psychotic’, or ‘autistic’, that the gap between us seems impressive, inaccessible, and impenetrable; and, ultimately, how is one to traverse the gap and penetrate the fear, which exists between oneself and oneself? Caesuras Freud (1926) writes, “There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive Caesura of the act of birth allows us to believe” (p. 138). In a footnote to Freud’s paper, Strachey notes that the word ‘Caesura’ is a term derived from classical prosody and means a particular kind of break in a line or verse, after which the verse continues. In music, it is a pause or breathing at a point of rhythmic division in a melody. So, ‘Caesura’ seems to bear the meaning of a break and continuity. Freud’s notion of the Caesura between prenatal and postnatal life, probably the most acute and dramatic separation experienced by Man, serves as a model for transcending every gap, space, or break. It portrays the continuity between states and events that seem to be so disparate, and yet are closely linked: sanity/insanity, past/present, memory/desire, sleep/wakefulness, emotional experience/interpretation (abstraction), etc., and ultimately the Caesura between one state of mind and another, between one person and another (transference/countertransference), and between Self and Self (conscious/unconscious, psyche/soma)...
