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- Title
Haptic Prosody and the Aesthetics of Baby Books.
- Authors
Miller, Carl F.; Tippin, R. Eric
- Abstract
While touch is the first sense to develop in the fetus, it has often been overlooked as the effective base of aesthetics and poetics in baby books. Likewise, while haptic prosody is a concept deployed in discussions of advanced poetic form, it generally only signifies touch rather than literally inviting it. The rhythm and theme of many baby books, in contrast, actively encourage (and even demand) touch—and this touch is not incidental to the books' prosody but a haptic means of realizing the biological realities on which poetic rhythm is arguably founded: the tension and release of the heartbeat and the breath. Both of these phenomena are uniquely tangible to the unborn child and are organized and elaborated in the haptic prosody of the baby book. If, as Derek Attridge has written, it is not possible "to discuss [poetic] rhythm without relating it to the movements of the human body," baby book prosody is of particular interest, given its themes and rubrics that dictate and imply human movement and touch. This article offers an early-stage analysis of surprisingly concretized touch-based prosody in a wide range of popular board books, soft books, and touch-and-feel books. While not unique to baby books, this tactile focus is distinct from the more virtuosic prosody of later-childhood picture books where rhythm functions in the abstract. Metered baby books assume a prior rhythmic competence in the baby, something already present which they intend to arrange and refine—per Stephen Blackwood's balancing "patterns in sense experience... [as] deep, innate structures" with the essentiality of aesthetic intervention and development. They also offer a vision of prosody, not as an arbitrary set of rules but as an organization of something endogenous to human biology. Far from exercises in affirming uniqueness or autonomy/defiance, these books instead induct the child into the rules-based environment of formal poetic prosody as well as the rule-breaking inherent in this prosody. In so doing, they provide innovative methods to not only better understand baby lit through poetic theory, but also to showcase the tremendous potential of baby lit to better understand the haptic origins of poetic rhythm at all levels.
- Subjects
BABY books; VERSIFICATION; AESTHETICS; POETICS; RHYTHM; TOUCH; PICTURE books for children; CHILDREN'S books
- Publication
Children's Literature in Education, 2023, Vol 54, Issue 3, p294
- ISSN
0045-6713
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10583-023-09560-w