From the Editor: The Novel and the Lyric

2014

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...

diacritics, 2017

2018

Jonathan Culler stands today as one of the most influential scholars of literature – and historian scholars of literary theory. The following interview provides only the snapshot of Culler’s significant presence and influence through his decades of scholarship and teaching in university classrooms. As we follow his path from Harvard (B.A. 1966) to Oxford (Rhodes Scholar and M.Phil 1968) through to his dissertation work at Oxford (D.Phil. 1972), followed by his directorship of modern languages at Cambridge (1969-1974) to his life-time career at Cornell (since 1977), Culler has singularly dedicated his career to formally exploring the theoretical frameworks that might best open literature to how we as readers explore and create meaning in its apprehension. As such, we see Culler’s scholarly journey zigzag in and through insights from philosophy (Phenomenology, for instance), linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics (Structuralism, for instance).

“This paper focuses on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) and the recent "Postcritical Turn" towards questions of affect, address, and readerly subjectivity. It argues figures of address in lyric theory are more useful tools for Rankine's poem and that her work represents a sustained move away from the model in avant-garde poetics in the US that considers literary practice as a cultural critique. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), has galvanised literary discourse to aim beyond 20th Century critical paradigms. By isolating ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ - as identified by Paul Ricœur - Felski suggests this stance is an outmoded artefact of literary criticism that can be overcome. Critics intentionally ignore what the text really tells us and instead “read against the grain and between the lines; their self-appointed task is to draw out what a text fails - or wilfully refuses - to see.” As such, critique considers exegesis a politically active process of identifying texts as symptomatic of ideological falsehood. This overdeveloped sense of the radicalism of interpretation, Felski contends, is a deluded narcissistic practice and critics, “thrive in the rarefied air of metacommentary, honing their ability to complicate and problematize, to turn statements about the world into statements about the forms of discourse in which they are made.” While the ‘heroic critic’ is recognisable in some criticism, the suggested alternatives have not found professional consensus. The term ‘post-critical turn’ remains in question, generating as much metacommentary as it set out to banish. To avoid this, I argue, we should be expanding our sample field. Turning to the contemporary novel to find a model for ‘postcritique’ (see Bewes, Fleissner and Anker) has overvalued fiction so that it dominates contemporary literary studies. When Felski refutes the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ with sensibility of “inspiration, invention, solace, recognition, reparation, or passion”, this is based on a privileging of the innovative narrative text. What’s more, novels are found to be innovative for possessing the very formal indicators of linguistic materiality, authorial undecidability and audience-oriented affect that poetic form has always been defined by. The contemporary lyric, I argue in this paper with its cultivated vocabulary of semantic indeterminacy, connotation and ambiguity, offers fertile ground for the critical reorientations underway in the profession. Making reference to Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), I show how the genre continues to realign the reading subject in an affective, ‘generous,’ or non-hierarchical relation to their object. I conclude with a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), inclusive of facsimile, photograph, and prose narrative, shows how vital the lyric genre can be for questions of identity and linguistic artifice and reaffirms how all language carries ideological meaning and subjective orientation. Literary practice of this vibrancy requires an extensive and deepened critical stance, not an emptied out one.

Neohelicon, 1986

Literator, 2010

This article provides a brief discussion of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of the study of narrativity in lyric poetry. As part of the justification of studying narrative aspects of lyric poetry, reference is made to contemporary paradigms in postclassical narratology of which transgeneric narratology is one. The project titled, “Verse and narrative: narrative structures and techniques in lyric poetry”, from which the articles in this issue emanated, is described briefly by presenting the objectives of the research and by discussing the theoretical and historical implications of such a project. The theoretical part of the article concludes with a list of the preliminary findings. The article also serves as an introduction to this issue of “Literator”, which contains the contributions on English and Dutch texts to the project.

Literature Compass, 2023

The ‘Romantic lyric’ as an idea or critical entity finds itself doubly maligned in contemporary lyric studies. As a perceived product of New Criticism, it finds itself accused by historicists of bringing about the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry in twentieth-century criticism, and, as a mimetic model of subjective expression, it’s disfavoured by lyric theorists who view it as a stepping stone towards the currently common misconception that lyrics are a species of dramatic monologue. Yet returning to the Romantics themselves, we discover other models of the lyric that sit outside the expressive model or the paradigm of lyricisation, and which may well be of use to contemporary lyric studies. This essay offers a reading of one such model in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the form of lyric’s semblance character: Coleridge is peculiarly and persistently concerned with the way the world appears to be (which is often not how the world really is), and his lyric poetry figures as a kind of seemingness in its own right, and one that reflects on the nature of appearances themselves. Before making a case for lyric semblance, this essay offers an overview of the state of lyric studies today, taking as exemplary the work of Virginia Jackson and Jonathan Culler; it places emphasis on the role of the ‘Romantic lyric’ in both accounts, and teases out some of what’s at stake in the tension between historicism and formalism that is at the centre of lyric studies today.

Journal of Literary Theory, 2015

Sometime around 1900, a fundamental shift occurred in the way animals were represented in works of Western literature, art, and philosophy. Authors began to write about animals in a way that was unheard-of or even unimaginable in previous epochs. Traditionally, animals had fulfilled a symbolic, allegorical, or satirical function. But in the period around the turn of the twentieth century these animals begin, as it were, to »misbehave« or to »resist« the metaphorical values attributed to them. There is a conspicuous abundance of animals in the literature of this period, and this animal presence is frequently characterised by a profound and troubling ambiguity, which is often more or less explicitly linked to the problem of writing, representation, and language – specifically poetic or metaphorical language.Taking the Austrian literary scholar Oskar Walzel’s 1918 essay »Neue Dichtung vom Tiere« as its starting point, this essay explores the historical and philosophicalbackground of this paradigm shift as well as its implications for the study of animals in literature more generally. Zoopoetics is both an object of study in its own right and a specific methodological and disciplinary problem for literary animal studies: what can the study of animals can contribute to literary studies and vice versa? What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might otherwise be blind to? Although animals abound in the literature of almost every geographical area and historical period, traditional literary criticism has been marked by the tendency to disregard this ubiquitous animal presence in literary texts, or else a single-minded determination to read animals exclusively as metaphors and symbols for something else, in short as »animal imagery«, which, as Margot Norris writes, »presupposes the use of the concrete to express the abstract, and indeed, it seem[s] that nowhere in literature [are] animals to be allowed to be themselves« (Norris 1985, 17). But what does it mean for literary theory and criticism to allow animals to »be themselves«? Is it possible to resist the tendency to press animals »into symbolic service« (ibid.) as metaphors and allegories for the human, whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal?The pervasive uneasiness regarding the metaphorical conception of the animal within recent scholarship in animal studies stems from a more general suspicion that such a conception serves ultimately to assimilate the animal to a fundamentally logocentric discourse and hence to reduce »animal problems to a principle that functions within the legibility of the animal: from animal to aniword« (Burt 2006, 166). The question of the animal thus turns out to have been thequestion of language all along. Conversely, however, we might also posit that thequestion of language has itself also always been the question of the animal. Whatwould it mean for literary studies if we were to take the implications of thisinvolution seriously? How can we be attentive to the specific way animals operatein literary texts as »functions of their literariness« (McHugh 2009, 490)? In otherwords, not merely as one trope in an author’s poetic arsenal that could easily bereplaced by any other, but rather as a specific problem to and for language andrepresentation as such.