Theory of the Lyric

by Jonathan Culler

Overview

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities.

“Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.”
—Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674979703
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/06/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Introduction 1

1 An Inductive Approach 10

Nine Poems 10

Four Parameters 33

2 Lyric as Genre 39

Notions of Genre 40

Lyric History 49

Lyric Genre 77

3 Theories of the Lyric 91

Hegel 92

Imitation Speech Acts or Epideixis? 109

Performative and Performance 125

4 Rhythm and Repetition 132

Meter 142

Rhythm 161

Sound and Repetition 173

5 Lyric Address 186

Address to Listeners or Readers 191

Addressing Other People 201

Apostrophe 211

6 Lyric Structures 244

Mapping the lyric 246

Lyric Hyperbole 258

Dramatic Monologue 263

Framing Past Events 275

The Lyric Present 283

7 Lyric and Society 296

Engagement and Disengagement 297

Three Examples 307

Adorno's Dialectic 331

Tangling with Ideology 336

Conclusion 349

Notes 355

Index 385

Editorial Reviews

Theory of the Lyric, by Culler, is an excellent source for understanding the academics and history of the lyric poem… It will be most appreciated by scholars seeking to understand the structure of this genre of poetry.

Choice - K. Gale

After decades of relative neglect, the last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the theory of the lyric, and Culler’s wide-ranging study is undoubtedly a milestone in this complicated process.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Francesco Giusti

Culler is a veteran of the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote what remain the clearest sympathetic explications of structuralism and post-structuralism. He has an exceptional ability to see the conceptual shape beneath a critical discourse, even if that shape is clouded by jokes or whiffs of bullshit, and to explain it in plain terms. Theory of the Lyric displays those skills. It begins with compressed but beautifully clear histories of both lyric and thinking about lyric; and, like other indispensable studies of this area such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure, it quotes in full a range of particularly well-chosen lyric poems, from Sappho and Goethe to A. A. Milne and A. R. Ammons, in order to establish its claims… Culler’s view of lyric has a flexibility that enables it to stand up pretty well to lyrics that might fly at it from left-field… What the book offers is something more like a study of the generative grammar of lyric poetry and of its practice than an all-encompassing model of what lyric has to be or could become.

London Review of Books - Colin Burrow

Jonathan Culler’s book is literally long-awaited—it is the culminating work of one of the most important poeticians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Simon Jarvis

How interesting, how convincing, and how disturbing to received ideas are the features to which Culler draws our attention? How useful or how provocative—for poetry, for thought, and for Theory—are his speculations on the forms and conditions of poetic meaning to which these observations lead? Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.

Critical Inquiry - Elizabeth Helsinger

A capacious and important piece of work. We need someone with the courage to take the broad view, across epochs and Western languages, and Culler is that person. Theory of the Lyric is a crucial intervention in restoring the vibrancy and significance of lyric.

Jahan Ramazani

Culler is a veteran of the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote what remain the clearest sympathetic explications of structuralism and post-structuralism. He has an exceptional ability to see the conceptual shape beneath a critical discourse, even if that shape is clouded by jokes or whiffs of bullshit, and to explain it in plain terms. Theory of the Lyric displays those skills. It begins with compressed but beautifully clear histories of both lyric and thinking about lyric; and, like other indispensable studies of this area such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure, it quotes in full a range of particularly well-chosen lyric poems, from Sappho and Goethe to A. A. Milne and A. R. Ammons, in order to establish its claims… Culler’s view of lyric has a flexibility that enables it to stand up pretty well to lyrics that might fly at it from left-field… What the book offers is something more like a study of the generative grammar of lyric poetry and of its practice than an all-encompassing model of what lyric has to be or could become.
-- Colin Burrow London Review of Books

After decades of relative neglect, the last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the theory of the lyric, and Culler’s wide-ranging study is undoubtedly a milestone in this complicated process.
-- Francesco Giusti Los Angeles Review of Books

How interesting, how convincing, and how disturbing to received ideas are the features to which Culler draws our attention? How useful or how provocative—for poetry, for thought, and for Theory—are his speculations on the forms and conditions of poetic meaning to which these observations lead? Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.
-- Elizabeth Helsinger Critical Inquiry

Theory of the Lyric, by Culler, is an excellent source for understanding the academics and history of the lyric poem… It will be most appreciated by scholars seeking to understand the structure of this genre of poetry.
-- K. Gale Choice

Jonathan Culler’s book is literally long-awaited—it is the culminating work of one of the most important poeticians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
-- Simon Jarvis, author of Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song

A capacious and important piece of work. We need someone with the courage to take the broad view, across epochs and Western languages, and Culler is that person. Theory of the Lyric is a crucial intervention in restoring the vibrancy and significance of lyric.
-- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres

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