The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology

670 Pages·2014·44.84 MB·English

by  Virginia Jackson

Lyric Theory Reader
The
A CriticalAnthology
Edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins
THE LYRIC THEORY READER
The Lyric Theory
Reader
A Critical Anthology
Edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE
© 2014 johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The lyric theory reader: a critical anthology I edited by Virginia jackson and
Yopie Prins.
pagescm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1199-6 (hardcover: acid-free paper)-ISBN 978-1-4214-1200-9
(pbk.: acid-free paper)-ISBN 1-4214-1199-7 (hardcover: acid-free paper)-
ISBN 1-4214-1200-4 (pbk.: acid-free paper) 1. Lyric poetry-History and criticism
Theory, etc. I. jackson, Virginia Walker, editor of compilation. II. Prins, Yopie, editor of
compilation.
PN1356.L98 2013
2013016725
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
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waste, whenever possible.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
General Introduction 1
PART ONE: HOW DOES LYRIC BECOME A GENRE?
SECTION 1 Genre Theory 11
1.1. Gerard Genette, "The Architext" (1979; trans. 1992) 17
1.2. Northrop Frye, "Theory of Genres" (1957) 30
1.3. Rene Wellek, "Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis" (1967) 40
1.4. Ralph Cohen, "History and Genre" (1986) 53
1.5. Jonathan Culler, "Lyric, History, and Genre" (2009) 63
1.6. Stanley Fish, "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" (1980) 77
SECTION 2 Models of Lyric 86
2.1. W. R. Johnson, "On the Absence of Ancient Lyric Theory" (1982) 91
2.2. Seth Lerer, "The Genre of the Grave and the Origins of the Middle English
Lyric" (1997) 104
2.3. Heather Dubrow, "Lyric Forms" (2ooo) 114
2-4. Helen Vendler, Introduction to The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997) 128
2.5. M. H. Abrams, "The Lyric as Poetic Norm" (1953) 140
2.6. Herbert F. Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of
Lyric" (1985) 144
vi PART TWO: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LYRIC READERS
SECTION 3 Anglo-American New Criticism 159
coNTENTs
3.1. I. A. Richards, "The Analysis of a Poem" and "The Definition of
a Poem" (1924) 165
3.2. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Introduction to
Understanding Poetry (1938) 177
3-3· T. S. Eliot, "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953) 192
3-4· W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional
Fallacy" (1946) 201
3-5· Reuben Brower, "The Speaking Voice" (1951) 211
SECTION 4 Structuralist Reading 219
4.1. Mikhail Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1953; trans. 1986) 224
4.2. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" (1960) 234
4.3. Michael Riffaterre, "The Poem's Significance" (1978) 249
SECTION 5 Post-Structuralist Reading 266
5.1. Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form" (1979) 275
5.2. Jacques Derrida, "Che cos'e la poesia?" (1988; trans. 1991) 287
5-3· Paul de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" (1984) 291
5-4. Barbara Johnson, "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" (1998) 304
SECTION 6 Frankfurt School and After 319
6.1. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939; trans. 1969) 327
6.2. Theodor W. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (1957; trans. 1991) 339
6.3. Fredric Jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The
Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial 'Sublime'" (1985) 350
6.4. Drew Milne, "In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The Limits of Lyric
Humanism" (2001) 361
6.5. Stathis Gourgouris, "The Lyric in Exile" (2004) 368
SECTION 7 Phenomenologies of Lyric Reading 382
7.1. Martin Heidegger, ". .. Poetically Man Dwells .. :' (1951; trans. 1971) 390
7.2. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Poetry as Experience: Two Poems by
Paul Celan" (1968; trans. 1999) 399
7·3· Allen Grossman, "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in
Speculative Poetics" (1990) 418
7·4· Giorgio Agamben, "The End of the Poem" (1996; trans. 1999) 430
7-5· Simon Jarvis, "Why Rhyme Pleases" (2011) 434
PART THREE: LYRIC DEPARTURES vii
SECTION 8 Avant-garde Anti-lyricism 451
CONTENTS
8.1. Marjorie Perloff, "Can(n)on to the Right of Us, Can(n)on to the Left of Us:
A Plea for Difference" (1987) 460
8.2. Charles Altieri, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in American
Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of
Some American Poetry" (1996) 477
8.3. Christopher Nealon, "The Matter of Capital, or Catastrophe
and Textuality" (2011) 487
8-4. Craig Dworkin, "Lyric and the Hazard of Music" (2oo8) 499
SECTION 9 Lyric and Sexual Difference 504
9.1. Nancy J. Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and
Scattered Rhyme" (1981) 511
9.2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Gender, Creativity, and the
Woman Poet" (1979) 522
9·3· Barbara Johnson, ''Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1987) 529
9-4· Thomas E. Yingling, "The Homosexual Lyric" (1990) 541
9-5· Juliana Spahr, Introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century:
Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) 557
SECTION 10 Comparative Lyric 568
10.1. Earl Miner, "Why Lyric?" (2ooo) 577
10.2. Jahan Ramazani, "Traveling Poetry" (2007) 589
10.3. Aamir R. Mufti, "Towards a Lyric History oflndia'' (2004) 603
10-4. Roland Greene, "Inter-American Obversals: Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo
de Campos circa 1960" (2oo8) 618
10.5. David Damrosch, "Love in the Necropolis" (2003) 632
Contributors 643
Source Acknowledgments 649
Index of Authors and Works 653
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Lyric Theory Reader is a collaborative project in every sense. It would not be possible
without the deep and lifelong collaboration of the editors, so we begin by thanking one
another. Our research assistants-LeifEckstrom, Rachel Feder, and Sara Grewal-deserve
co-editorial credit. Their wizardry in transcribing, proofing, filing, and gathering per
missions for the essays included here literally made this book possible. Generous research
funding from Tufts University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Califor
nia, Irvine, supported these collaborations. The editors at Johns Hopkins University
Press have also been extraordinarily supportive of our collective editorial efforts at every
step in this long process. We thank them and the Press's insightful outside reader for be
lieving in this book.
The graduate students in our lyric theory seminars at Rutgers, New York University,
Tufts, Irvine, and Michigan have each and all contributed to making this a better book.
They test drove the anthology at high speeds and with great skill, and they did us the great
favor of figuring out what worked and what slowed them down. There are also colleagues
across many universities who have helped to shape the ongoing conversation surrounding
this project. At institutions and conferences, the agreements, disagreements, celebrations,
and discoveries we have been fortunate enough to encounter with other thinkers about
poetry and poetics are the living foundation of this book. And like all long intellectual
labors, this anthology has required not only enormous institutional and intellectual sup
port but also the patience and help of our friends and family, including Martin Harries
and Michael Daugherty. We are grateful to all our interlocutors, near and far.
Finally, we would like to thank the lyric theorists whose essays appear in this volume.
This anthology is about them, and it is for the readers who continue to think about poetry
in the ways these theorists have imagined they might-and in ways neither the editors
nor the contributors could have foreseen.
THE LYRIC THEORY READER
General Introduction
We take it for granted that we know what a lyric is. As a term derived from ancient Greek
to designate a song accompanied by the lyre, its association with musical performance
persists today in popular "song lyrics" with instrumental accompaniment, but "lyric po
etry" is also invoked more abstractly as a literary production that is read, not sung. Often a
poem is considered lyric when it represents an utterance in the first person, an expression
of personal feeling, according to a model of modern lyric reading that diverges from the
way poems were performed (and read) in antiquity. Or as an alternative to expressive read
ing, a poem may be called lyric when it foregrounds the musicality of language by appeal to
the ear or to the eye. Sometimes poems are called lyrics simply because they are short;
sometimes lyric is defined in opposition to narrative, assuming a modern binary in literary
modes; increasingly, lyric is a way to describe the essence of poetry, a poem at its most
poetic. Whether we think about the lyric as ancient origin or modern imaginary, on the
page or in the air, we need to have some idea of what a lyric is (or was) in the first place. Yet
it has become as notoriously difficult to define the lyric as it is impossible to define poetry
itself.1 How is it possible that almost all poetry has come to be read as essentially lyric and
at the same time we do not seem to know how to define the lyric? Since assumptions widely
shared are usually the ideas least and last investigated, it may be the case that because we
have come to think of all poetry as lyric, we have not really wanted a concise definition of
lyric. Perhaps the lyric has become so difficult to define because we need it to be blurry
around the edges, to remain capacious enough to include all kinds of verse and all kinds of
ideas about what poetry is or should be.
Yet such problems of definition are also always invitations to theorists. This anthology
traces a critical genealogy of the modern idea oflyric as it has emerged in Anglo-American
literary criticism of the past century. To say that the lyric is a modern idea or theory rather
than an ancient genre might surprise readers accustomed to thinking about lyric poetry as a
given in the Western tradition-indeed, as the oldest form in that tradition, the origin oflit
erature and civilization. It is true that if we think of choral hymns or Sappho's odes or even
tribal chants or popular song as the roots oflyric, a critical genealogy oflyric as a modern
theory does not make much sense. But the concept of lyric as the oldest form of poetic
expression is actually a relatively recent notion; specifically, it is a post-Enlightenment idea,