Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry

This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins – or outside of — the modern Anglo-European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre, as well as what may be a majoritarian, heteronormative or Eurocentric set of biases behind contemporary attacks on the lyric as solipsistic, apolitical “personal expression.” Participants will draw on their own cultural and linguistic specialties to compile a multi-lingual course Reader of modern lyrical poetry marginalized by gender, sexuality, class, race, place or language. My own contribution to the readings will include selections from bilingual anthologies of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, and examples of biblical poetry as an alternative model of the lyric, in which the distinction between the personal and the collective, the political and the “apolitical” is rendered meaningless. Through a series of historically and linguistically informed close readings, we will examine both standard and non-normative theoretical studies of the lyric, maintaining a critical awareness of the extent to which our paradigm examples affect our understanding of the genre. Questions we may want to ask include: How does the view from the margins problematize such western commonplaces as the coherence and authority of the lyrical “I,” the subject-object divide, the dichotomy between apostrophe and address, the conflation of the “lyrical” and “subjective” with the “feminine,” or the lyric’s purported freedom — or flight! — from the historical and the social?

Requirements: The seminar group will compile a Reader of modern lyrics as well as cultural and theoretical background materials relevant for the participants’ different languages of specialization. 1 in-class presentation and 1 seminar paper. COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS WILL BE ENCOURAGED.

Reading List:

1. Selections from: The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (bilingual anthology), eds. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse & Khone Shemruk. New York: Penguin, 1988. (Out of print; photocopy available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing).

2. The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; paperback edition (available online for UC students). Hebrew readers will be supplied with the Hebrew texts.

3. The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems (bilingual anthology), eds. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar Hess, New York: Feminist Press, 1999.