Write a one page summarize the theories of lyrics

Despite the proliferation of theory in literary studies since the 1960s, little attention has been paid to the theory of lyric. We could even say that since the 1930s theoretical discourses that focus on poetry have had

in view something other than the lyric. Julia Kristeva’s account in La Révo- lution du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language) treats literary production and indeed linguistic production in general as a dialectic of le semiotique and le symbolique, two modalities of discourse which are in- separable in the process of “signifiance,” but her analysis gives as much weight to the prose of Lautréamont as to the poetry of Mallarmé and does not lead to a theory of the lyric. Heidegger offers an eloquent philoso- phical account of poetry, focused especially on lyric examples—primarily the poetry of Hölderlin—but while taking poetry as the privileged site for the unconcealment or presencing of Being and the happening of Truth, Heidegger is disdainful of poetics, of attention to prosody, image, and other features of the language of poems, and indeed distinguishes Dich- tung, true poetry attuned to Being, from Poesie, which one might translate as “poetizing.” Heidegger’s lack of interest in genre or in features of genre and his conception of poetry as a condition of ontology make his thought an unpromising starting point for a theory of the lyric.1 We do better to turn to Hegel, whose detailed account of the lyric can prove very useful.

1.Hegel

Hegel provides an explicit theory of the lyric in the context of his Aesthetics, a systematic account of the arts that is internally coherent and follows a developmental logic. Although his theory is of interest in itself, it com- pels attention above all as the fullest expression of the romantic theory of the lyric—articulated also in various forms and less systematically by others—which has exercised vast influence, even among those who have never read a word of Hegel. For him, as for others, lyric is the subjective genre of poetry, as opposed to epic, which is objective, and drama, which is mixed. In the lyric the “content is not the object but the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of subjective life” (1038).2 Poetry is an expressive form, and even what is most substantive is communicated as “the passion, mood or reflection” of the individual. Its distinguishing feature is the centrality of subjectivity coming to con- sciousness of itself through experience and reflection (974, 1113).

2. Imitation Speech Acts or Epideixis?

The major alternative to the romantic theory of the lyric has been an ad- aptation of it that subordinates expression, especially self-expression, to mimesis. I noted in Chapter 2 that it was a more robust conception of the individual subject (political, economic, affective) that enabled theo- rists in the eighteenth century, such as Abbé Batteux, to install lyric as a major genre in a neo-Aristotelian framework by treating it as an imita- tion: an imitation of the experience of the subject. Once lyric was estab- lished as the subjective form, romantic theorists, such as Sir William Jones and then Hegel, could jettison mimesis for expression: the lyric is funda- mentally expressive of the experience of the poet. Modern criticism, increasingly cognizant of the problems of treating lyric as the direct and sincere expression of the experience and affect of the poet, has moved to- ward something of a compromise position, treating lyric as expression of a persona rather than of the poet and thus as mimesis of the thought or speech of such a persona created by the poet. If the speaker is a persona, then interpretation of the poem becomes a matter of reconstructing the characteristics of this persona, especially the motives and circumstances of this act of speech—as if the speaker were a character in a novel.

This is the conception of lyric promoted by the New Criticism: with the insistence that interpretation focus on the words on the page rather than the intentions of the author, it became a point of doctrine that the speaker of a lyric is to be treated as a persona, not as the poet him- or her- self, and the focus becomes the drama of attitudes expressed by this speaker-character. W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks write, “Once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals itself as drama.” In the Anglo-American world, this principle has become the foundation of pedagogy of the lyric.

3.Performative and Performance

J. L. Austin distinguished performative utterances, which accomplish the action to which they refer, from constative utterances, which make true or false statements. “I promise to pay you tomorrow” does not report on an act of promising but is itself the act. Many performatives have an ex- plicitly ritualistic character: “I hereby call this meeting to order.” “I now pronounce you man and wife.”30 Poems clearly do contain some true per- formatives: from Horace’s “We sing of of drinking parties, of battles fought / by fierce virgins with nails cut sharp to wound young men” and Herrick’s “I sing of brooks, and blossoms, birds and bowers . . . ,” to Baudelaire’s “Andromaque, je pense à vous” (“Andromaque, I think of you”), which perform the acts to which they refer. But the appeal of the notion of the performative for literary critics goes far beyond that of such explicit formulae. Austin introduces the notion as a critique of the ten- dency of his colleagues, analytical philosophers, to assume that the busi- ness of language is to describe a state of affairs or to state a fact, and that other sorts of utterances should be regarded as emotive, or pseudo- statements. It is natural to go on to ask, Austin writes, whether many ap- parently pseudo-statements really set out to be statements at all, and he proposes the distinction between constative utterances, which make a statement and are true or false, and another class of utterances which are