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five Infidel Lyric: The Rhymes of the Canting Crew
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Published:October 2009
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Abstract
This chapter focuses on a particular genre in the vernacular tradition of poetry: songs written in the jargon of the criminal underworld. As a literary phenomenon, the inscrutability of this jargon to outsiders is itself worthy of attention, yet it also serves as an index of the broader spectrum of lyric obscurity in the vernacular tradition. Some passages in these infidel songs are perfectly opaque—unintelligible—to an outsider. They often suggest that the inaccessibility of songs written in cant, like the ontological obscurity of the riddle, serves to model a kind of abject sociability, as well as the discontinuous substance of the monadology. The chapter emphasizes the correlation between lyric and sociological obscurities, especially the unavoidable obscurity introduced by the element of slang, which links the songs of various social underworlds to the productive obscurity of vernacular lyric in general. Further, it considers that lyric obscurity—that is, the substance of lyric expression—may be viewed, not as an obstacle to fashioning social relations, as it is conventionally regarded, but rather as an element essential to the formation of communities marked at once by secrecy and transmissibility.
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