ABSTRACT
Interdisciplinary Conference participants assembled under the premise that "literary critics" would be "joined by linguists, psychologists, a few cultural anthropologists" in "a genuine attempt by a group of scholars from several disciplines to bring their special resources of knowledge to bear on one problem, the nature and characteristics of style in literature". Linguists had already spent years studying the nature and characteristics of metrical stress, and Wimsatt's general resistance to that breach of the disciplinary divide becomes apparent in a paper that defends the traditional practice of foot prosody against accounts of meter inspired by the competing discipline of linguistics. From one perspective, the exchange between John Hollander and W. K. Wimsatt is clearly remote from critical concerns: it focuses on the marginal topic of prosody, and it dramatizes the familiar centrality of Yale as the site of confrontation between the then dominant theories of New Criticism and the innovative linguistic theories by which New Criticism would soon be displaced.
