Jackson: Topics in Poetics. Lyric Theory G41.3954

This seminar will focus on relatively recent theories of the lyric genre. Although the lyric itself is an ancient phenomenon (think Sappho), we will be interested in the modern lyricization of poetry--a process of abstraction in which various poetic genres (sonnets, odes, epistles, hymns, ballads, songs, elegies) have become, simply, "lyric." Rather than trace that development through literary history, we will be interested in the ways in which theorists of the last seventy-five years have tended to take the lyric as a genre out of that history (and then have sometimes tried to put it back in). We will begin with some texts to which modern lyric theorists like to refer (Longinus, Mill, Hegel, Eliot), but our emphasis will fall on the New Critics (Empson, Brooks, Wimsatt & Beardsley), Benjamin, Adorno, Bakhtin, Friedrich, Frye, de Man, Culler, Johnson, Agamben, and Stewart. We may also explore theoretical associations between the lyric and music, or lyric and the plastic arts. Our questions will range from the differences between formalist, Marxist, and post-structural approaches to lyric abstraction to the importance of such abstraction for modern lyric pedagogy.

Students will be required to give an oral report (associating a theorist with a specific lyric text), and to submit a seminar-length (20-30-page) paper (based on archival research) at the end of the term.