Write a one page summarize thetheories of lyrics

Despite the proliferation oftheory in literary studies since the 1960s, little attention hasbeen paid to the theory of lyric. We could even say that since the1930s theoretical discourses that focus on poetry havehad

in view something other than thelyric. Julia Kristeva’s account in La Révo- lution du langagepoétique (Revolution in Poetic Language) treats literary productionand indeed linguistic production in general as a dialectic of lesemiotique and le symbolique, two modalities of discourse which arein- separable in the process of “signifiance,” but her analysisgives as much weight to the prose of Lautréamont as to the poetryof Mallarmé and does not lead to a theory of the lyric. Heideggeroffers an eloquent philoso- phical account of poetry, focusedespecially on lyric examples—primarily the poetry of Hölderlin—butwhile taking poetry as the privileged site for the unconcealment orpresencing of Being and the happening of Truth, Heidegger isdisdainful of poetics, of attention to prosody, image, and otherfeatures of the language of poems, and indeed distinguishes Dich-tung, true poetry attuned to Being, from Poesie, which one mighttranslate as “poetizing.” Heidegger’s lack of interest in genre orin features of genre and his conception of poetry as a condition ofontology make his thought an unpromising starting point for atheory of the lyric.1 We do better to turn to Hegel, whose detailedaccount of the lyric can prove very useful.

1.Hegel

Hegel provides an explicit theoryof the lyric in the context of his Aesthetics, a systematic accountof the arts that is internally coherent and follows a developmentallogic. Although his theory is of interest in itself, it com- pelsattention above all as the fullest expression of the romantictheory of the lyric—articulated also in various forms and lesssystematically by others—which has exercised vast influence, evenamong those who have never read a word of Hegel. For him, as forothers, lyric is the subjective genre of poetry, as opposed toepic, which is objective, and drama, which is mixed. In the lyricthe “content is not the object but the subject, the inner world,the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding toaction, remains alone with itself as inwardness and that thereforecan take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression ofsubjective life” (1038).2 Poetry is an expressive form, and evenwhat is most substantive is communicated as “the passion, mood orreflection” of the individual. Its distinguishing feature is thecentrality of subjectivity coming to con- sciousness of itselfthrough experience and reflection (974, 1113).

2. Imitation Speech Acts orEpideixis?

The major alternative to theromantic theory of the lyric has been an ad- aptation of it thatsubordinates expression, especially self-expression, to mimesis. Inoted in Chapter 2 that it was a more robust conception of theindividual subject (political, economic, affective) that enabledtheo- rists in the eighteenth century, such as Abbé Batteux, toinstall lyric as a major genre in a neo-Aristotelian framework bytreating it as an imita- tion: an imitation of the experience ofthe subject. Once lyric was estab- lished as the subjective form,romantic theorists, such as Sir William Jones and then Hegel, couldjettison mimesis for expression: the lyric is funda- mentallyexpressive of the experience of the poet. Modern criticism,increasingly cognizant of the problems of treating lyric as thedirect and sincere expression of the experience and affect of thepoet, has moved to- ward something of a compromise position,treating lyric as expression of a persona rather than of the poetand thus as mimesis of the thought or speech of such a personacreated by the poet. If the speaker is a persona, theninterpretation of the poem becomes a matter of reconstructing thecharacteristics of this persona, especially the motives andcircumstances of this act of speech—as if the speaker were acharacter in a novel.

This is the conception of lyricpromoted by the New Criticism: with the insistence thatinterpretation focus on the words on the page rather than theintentions of the author, it became a point of doctrine that thespeaker of a lyric is to be treated as a persona, not as the poethim- or her- self, and the focus becomes the drama of attitudesexpressed by this speaker-character. W. K. Wimsatt and CleanthBrooks write, “Once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyricfrom the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric revealsitself as drama.” In the Anglo-American world, this principle hasbecome the foundation of pedagogy of the lyric.

3.Performative andPerformance

J. L. Austin distinguishedperformative utterances, which accomplish the action to which theyrefer, from constative utterances, which make true or falsestatements. “I promise to pay you tomorrow” does not report on anact of promising but is itself the act. Many performatives have anex- plicitly ritualistic character: “I hereby call this meeting toorder.” “I now pronounce you man and wife.”30 Poems clearly docontain some true per- formatives: from Horace’s “We sing of ofdrinking parties, of battles fought / by fierce virgins with nailscut sharp to wound young men” and Herrick’s “I sing of brooks, andblossoms, birds and bowers . . . ,” to Baudelaire’s “Andromaque, jepense à vous” (“Andromaque, I think of you”), which perform theacts to which they refer. But the appeal of the notion of theperformative for literary critics goes far beyond that of suchexplicit formulae. Austin introduces the notion as a critique ofthe ten- dency of his colleagues, analytical philosophers, toassume that the busi- ness of language is to describe a state ofaffairs or to state a fact, and that other sorts of utterancesshould be regarded as emotive, or pseudo- statements. It is naturalto go on to ask, Austin writes, whether many ap- parentlypseudo-statements really set out to be statements at all, and heproposes the distinction between constative utterances, which makea statement and are true or false, and another class of utteranceswhich are