Reversion: Lyric Time(s) II, in "Re-: An Errant Glossary", ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2019), pp. 151–61 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lyric History: Temporality, Rhetoric, and the Ethics of Poetry
In this essay, I am less interested in the specifics of the on-going polemics around the “new lyricism,” than I am in the problematics of historical engagement and ethical implication that subtend them and open onto more general problematics of textuality, history, and interpretation that lyrics often foreground. These problematics do not obviate the importance of historical considerations in lyrical reading, nor do they undermine the crucial importance of history itself in our social and political lives. To refocus critical attention on poetry’s connection with its readers and the world, as in the new lyric studies, also reminds us that lyric has a rhetorical aspect and that the indeterminacies of lyric’s representation of a recollected moment of being or experience cannot be resolved by appeals to history as a ground for interpretation. The meaning of lyric and its engagement with the world exists in the futurity of its reader, the unpredictable phenomenology of its reception. Paradoxically, the historicization of lyric reminds us that history itself has a lyrical aspect. It combines recollection and projection, a statement of a past experience or state of being addressed to the subjectivity of a future reader or audience whose realms of experience and states of being remain indeterminate. Lyric poetry is one artistic form that makes this problematic involution of literature and history especially evident, though critics have traditionally assumed that no literary genre was more distant from its historical contexts.
Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2018
Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.
Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R, Jacoff, rpt. Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, Fordham UP, 2006, pp. 23-46, 1993
Dante and the lyric past TEODOLINDA BAROLINI DANTE is HEIR to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provencal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfthcentury southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry -based on the notion of the lover's feudal service to "midons" (Italian "madonna"), his lady, from whom he expects a "guerdon" (Italian "guiderdone"), or reward -were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo, which became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence's contentious political poetry, which was left behind. The "leader" (or "caposcuola") of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provencal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric "genres"). Giacomo signs himself "the Notary," referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old -represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself -and the new: the avant-garde poets of the "dolce stil novo" or "sweet new style" (Purgatorio 24, 57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth. Like Giacomo, the other Sicilian poets were in the main court functionaries: in the De vulgari eloquentia Guido delle Colonne is called "Judge of Messina," while Pier della Vigna, whom Dante places among the suicides in Hell, was Frederick's chancellor and private secretary. Their moment in history coincides with Frederick's moment, and the demise of their school essentially coincides with the emperor's death in 1250.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, 2020
If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21st century, various literary critics have sought to manage these competing imperatives by developing an “historical poetics.” These critics pursue sometimes very different projects, working with diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, but they share a desire to think again about the relation between poetics and history. Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry. For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.