The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology

by Virginia Jackson (Editor), Yopie Prins (Editor)

Overview

Reading lyric poetry over the past century.

The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry.

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric.

Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421412009
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2014
Pages:	680
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading.

Yopie Prins is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan and author of Victorian Sappho.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

General Introduction 1

Part 1 How Does Lyric Become a Genre?

Section 1 Genre Theory 11

1.1 "The Architext" (1979; trans. 1992) Gérard Genette 17

1.2 "Theory of Genres" (1957) Northrop Frye 30

1.3 "Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis" (1967) René Wellek 40

1.4 "History and Genre" (1986) Ralph Cohen 53

1.5 "Lyric, History, and Genre" (2009) Jonathan Culler 63

1.6 "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" (1980) Stanley Fish 77

Section 2 Models of Lyric 86

2.1 "On the Absence of Ancient Lyric Theory" (1982) W. R. Johnson 91

2.2 "The Genre of the Grave and the Origins of the Middle English Lyric" (1997) Seth Lerer 104

2.3 "Lyric Forms" (2000) Heather Dubrow 114

2.4 Introduction to The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997) Helen Vendler 128

2.5 "The Lyric as Poetic Norm" (1953) M. H. Abrams 140

2.6 "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric" (1985) Herbert F. Tucker 144

Part 2 Twentieth-Century Lyric Readers

Section 3 Anglo-American New Criticism 159

3.1 "The Analysis of a Poem" and "The Definition of a Poem" (1924) I. A. Richards 165

3.2 Introduction to Understanding Poetry (1938) Cleanth Brooks Robert Penn Warren 177

3.3 "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953) T. S. Eliot 192

3.4 "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) W. K. Wimsatt Monroe Beardsley 201

3.5 "The Speaking Voice" (1951) Reuben Brower 211

Section 4 Structuralist Reading 219

4.1 "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1953; trans. 1986) Mikhail Bakhtin 224

4.2 "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" (1960) Roman Jakobson 234

4.3 "The Poems Significance" (1978) Michael Riffaterre 249

Section 5 Post-Structuralist Reading 266

5.1 "The Breaking of Form" (1979) Harold Bloom 275

5.2 "Che cos'è la poesia?" (1988; trans. 1991) Jacques Derrida 287

5.3 "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" (1984) Paul de Man 291

5.4 "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" (1998) Barbara Johnson 304

Section 6 Frankfurt School and After 319

6.1 "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939; trans. 1969) Walter Benjamin 327

6.2 "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (1957; trans. 1991) Theodor W. Adorno 339

6.3 "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial 'Sublime'" (1985) Fredric Jameson 350

6.4 "In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The Limits of Lyric Humanism" (2001) Drew Milne 361

6.5 "The Lyric in Exile" (2004) Stathis Gourgouris 368

Section 7 Phenomenologies of Lyric Reading 382

7.1 "… Poetically Man Dwells…" (1951; trans. 1971) Martin Heidegger 390

7.2 "Poetry as Experience: Two Poems by Paul Celan" (1968; trans. 1999) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe 399

7.3 "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics" (1990) Allen Grossman 418

7.4 "The End of the Poem" (1996; trans. 1999) Giorgio Agamben 430

7.5 "Why Rhyme Pleases" (2011) Simon Jarvis 434

Part 3 Lyric Departures

Section 8 Avant-garde Anti-lyricism 451

8.1 "Can(n)on to the Right of Us, Can(n)on to the Left of Us: A Plea for Difference" (1987) Marjorie Perloff 460

8.2 "What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry" (1996) Charles Altieri 477

8.3 "The Matter of Capital, or Catastrophe and Textuality" (2011) Christopher Nealon 487

8.4 "Lyric and the Hazard of Music" (2008) Craig Dworkin 499

Section 9 Lyric and Sexual Difference 504

9.1 "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme" (1981) Nancy J. Vickers 511

9.2 "Gender, Creativity, and the Woman Poet" (1979) Sandra M. Gilbert Susan Gubar 522

9.3 "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1987) Barbara Johnson 529

9.4 "The Homosexual Lyric" (1990) Thomas E. Yingling 541

9.5 Introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) Juliana Spahr 557

Section 10 Comparative Lyric 568

10.1 "Why Lyric?" (2000) Earl Miner 577

10.2 "Traveling Poetry" (2007) Jahan Ramazani 589

10.3 "Towards a Lyric History of India" (2004) Aamir R. Mufti 603

10.4 "Inter-American Obversals: Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos circa 1960" (2008) Roland Greene 618

10.5 "Love in the Necropolis" (2003) David Damrosch 632

Contributors 643

Source Acknowledgments 649

Index of Authors and Works 653

What People are Saying About This

Michael McKeon

Through an astute selection of essays and a series of brilliant commentaries on them, Jackson and Prins show that although the way we conceive lyric is a recent invention that embodies a singularly modern and Western set of cultural ideas and values, we uphold lyric as the universal model of what poetry is and should be. Reading The Lyric Theory Reader is an exhilarating experience. In collecting what are arguably the most important modern statements about lyric, it opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on this most enduringly canonical of literary categories, and in that process encourages our most searching reflections on the historical existence of literary forms.

Joshua Clover

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have done tremendous service to poetics in the nuanced and comprehensive work of constellation and accompanying commentary—providing a model of editorial lucidity, a library in a box, and a ceaselessly generative contradiction which is in the end perhaps itself the strongest argument for the lyric’s eccentric centrality.

Frances Ferguson

A distinct account emerges of the life-history of the conception of the lyric as a genre—from the moment of its recognition as a genre that is said to have always been central, to the New Critical insistence that lyric is available because everyone can overhear it, to the increasing equation of lyric with poetry that occurs as the collapse of the genre system washes over both the novel and the lyric, leaving narrative and poetry in its wake. The Lyric Theory Reader is a worthy counterpart to Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the lyric, in poetry.

From the Publisher

Through an astute selection of essays and a series of brilliant commentaries on them, Jackson and Prins show that although the way we conceive lyric is a recent invention that embodies a singularly modern and Western set of cultural ideas and values, we uphold lyric as the universal model of what poetry is and should be. Reading The Lyric Theory Reader is an exhilarating experience. In collecting what are arguably the most important modern statements about lyric, it opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on this most enduringly canonical of literary categories, and in that process encourages our most searching reflections on the historical existence of literary forms.
—Michael McKeon, Rutgers University

A distinct account emerges of the life-history of the conception of the lyric as a genre—from the moment of its recognition as a genre that is said to have always been central, to the New Critical insistence that lyric is available because everyone can overhear it, to the increasing equation of lyric with poetry that occurs as the collapse of the genre system washes over both the novel and the lyric, leaving narrative and poetry in its wake. The Lyric Theory Reader is a worthy counterpart to Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the lyric, in poetry.
—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have done tremendous service to poetics in the nuanced and comprehensive work of constellation and accompanying commentary—providing a model of editorial lucidity, a library in a box, and a ceaselessly generative contradiction which is in the end perhaps itself the strongest argument for the lyric’s eccentric centrality.
—Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis

Editorial Reviews

The thesis of The Lyric Theory Reader—that the very existence of the genre is more a critical extrapolation than anything solid and real—may seem to be itself a kind of critical conceit, but only because the argument serves the Reader exceptionally well as a cogent frame for taking stock of a diversity of approaches. Accordingly, the Reader would seem especially useful as a primer for up and coming scholars. . . Overall, the Reader should be considered essential in the formation of a thoughtful scholar of poetry and its criticism.
—Peter Fields, Rocky Mountain Review

From the Publisher

The thesis of The Lyric Theory Reader—that the very existence of the genre is more a critical extrapolation than anything solid and real—may seem to be itself a kind of critical conceit, but only because the argument serves the Reader exceptionally well as a cogent frame for taking stock of a diversity of approaches. Accordingly, the Reader would seem especially useful as a primer for up and coming scholars. . . Overall, the Reader should be considered essential in the formation of a thoughtful scholar of poetry and its criticism.

Rocky Mountain Review - Peter Fields