Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry

This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins of the modern European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre. The students will compile a multi-lingual anthology of modern lyrical poets marginalized by gender, class, race or language. My own contribution to the readings will include bilingual anthologies of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, and an examination of biblical poetry as an alternative to “classical” models of the lyric. Through a series of historically and linguistically informed close readings, we will be able to approach both standard and controversial theoretical studies of the lyric with a new critical awareness of the extent to which our paradigm examples affect our notions of genre. How does the view from the margins problematize such western commonplaces of the lyric as the coherence and authority of the lyrical “I,” the subject-object divide, the conflation of “lyrical,” “subjective” and “feminine,” or the lyric’s purported freedom — or flight! — from history and ideology?

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

Reading List:

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.)

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

David Lindley, Lyric (Critical Idiom Series); out of print; photocopy available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing.

Reader I (available first week of classes from Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2015 Shattuck, phone 704-9700). Includes selections from Mark Jeffreys’ New Definitions of Lyric, Parker and Hosek, Beyond New Criticism as well as essays by Jonathan Culler, Michael Gluzman, Barbara Johnson, Bonnie Kime-Scott, Victor Li, Dan Miron, Mary Louise Pratt, Celeste Schenck and others.