Rhythm
“Rhythm is an original and masterfully researched intervention in the study of rhythm and, more broadly, literature. Starting from the ancient Greeks and ending with Emmanuel Levinas, Barletta brings together an impressive number of authors and texts from over two millennia, offering a fresh reading of what we mean when we say ‘rhythm.’"
— Katharina N. Piechocki, author of Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe
“Barletta offers a well-written, thoughtful, and original contribution to thinking on rhythm and poetic form.”
— Susan Stewart, author of The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making
Vincent Barletta is an author and tenured associate professor of Comparative Literature and Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. He is also a research associate at the university's Europe Center and associate faculty in the Center for African Studies, the Center for Latin American studies, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
Barletta's primary areas of research and teaching are medieval and early modern Iberian literature, Iberian Islam, Portuguese literature, literature and linguistic anthropology, and literature and philosophy.
Barletta has written several books. His latest is Rhythm: Form and Dispossession (Chicago, 2020). Other books are Covert Gestures, Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (Univ of Minnesota, 2005), and Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (Chicago, 2010). He won the La corónica book prize in 2007 for Covert Gestures. He is also the editor/translator of A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada (Chicago, 2007) by Francisco Núñez Muley and co-editor/translator (with Mark L. Bajus and Cici Malik) of Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400-1700 (Chicago, 2013).