This reading is for those enrolled in the Senior Seminar (EN 425).
Jonathan Culler’s “Lyric, History, and Genre” tackles, in part, what we call “lyric theory” – which is neither a theory nor the theory, that is, not a thing unto itself. This is a slippery, tricky thing; Culler attempts to historicise and conceptualise the many disparate things which have at some point been called lyrics, and asks another series of questions.
Do we begin with a set of criteria—brevity, subjective expression, rhyme and rhythm—and then decide that this poem is in, that poem out? Or do we begin with a set of unambiguous instances, of canonized lyrics, and then from them derive a concept, the idea of the lyric as such?
Culler’s chapter takes this second approach; it moves inductively. It traces an arc through nine poems—by Sappho, Horace, Petrarch, Goethe, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Lorca, Williams, and Ashbery—and then, reviewing this material, it proposes four “parameters”: lyric as voicing, lyric as event, lyric as ritual, and lyric as hyperbole.
