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Why Lyric J. Culler
Why Lyric J. Culler
.
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123-1
theories
and
methodologies
WhyLyric?
JONATHAN CULLER
BUT INITSOWNWORLD:NEVER
HAVE
POETRYISALIVEINOURCULTURE,
THEREBEENSOMANYPOETSAND POETRYREADINGS,
BOOKS,JOUR
nals, and online sites. Poetry has certainly seemed threatened,
though, in schools and universities, where literary studies focus on
prose fiction?narrative has become the norm of literature?or else
on other sorts of cultural texts,which can be read
symptomatically.
Narrative is treated not as one possible literary form but as the
it is frequently assimilated?not
themodel of nar
surprisingly?to
rative fiction. Ever since the novel became themain form of literary
experience for students and general readers, a model of poetry based
on representation has come to hold sway: the fictional representa
Romantic
out what
sort of person
is
speaking,
in what
circumstances
and with
the post-Enlightenment
"Spring Pools,"from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright
1928, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1956 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permis
2008
BY THE MODERN
LANGUAGE
ASSOCIATION
OF AMERICA
201
202
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Why Lyric? f
PMLA
and Cleanth
with each
line?and
to
drama
These
enormous
intensity,
experience
strated as certain
be
out
inwardness
and
that can
never
and
can never
to the
quality
One must
is obvious.
relevant
immediacy
be demon
be
of art-The
abandon
shown
to
way
attempts
Wellek
manifesto
Wellek
of conceiving of Dickinson's
verse, which
for her was caught up in various practices of
everyday life. But ifwe are to encourage the
study and teaching of poetry, the historical
i23.i
sonnet,
salient characteristics
remain to
so as to note
read as a dramatic monologue
both the plausibility of reading lyric in this
a
novelizing way and what ismissed by such
nature
and be
summer
woods
flowers
Jonathan Culler
203
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ft
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a
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a character,
a situation,
and
a narra
trees, which
proceed in their
natural operation without any sort of think
ing.What this approach has trouble dealing
with are those elements that do not make
much
the two
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[
elements as part of a process, or the ritualistic
repetition "And like the flowers beside them,
chill and shiver, /
Will like the flowers beside
them soon be gone." But especially foreign to
themodel
is the
of the dramatic monologue
of
the
allusion
final
which
has
line,
literary
to be attributed to the poet addressing read
ers rather than to the character looking at
the pools:
'Z
?
ii
4*?
only yes
terday." Answering Francois Villon's famous
question "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"
mer
surprises by show
of valuing any moment
librarians of Alexandria,
production
uity, canonized
to someone.
with themodern
to an
The audience
x 2 3 . i
of judging
pable concerning verses"?capable
which sayings of poets were rightly done and
to give reasons when questioned
(333-40).
addressed, a rhetorical
poem as discourse
transaction, so the hyperbolic forms of ad
of lyric?from
dress characteristic
apos
urns to
trophes to birds and clouds and
obsessional
addresses
to a mistress?would
mais
or "I wake
involve patterning of
embodies
and
Culler
1 Jonathan
before the
and displacement
consolidation of subject positions but espe
cially to rhythm and the bodily experience
identification
the other.
Narrative
structures
are
trans
shaping and
once
suffused
phonological patterning. Lyric
form the adver
culture in that bastardized
memorable
by its rhythmical
of lyric, emphasizing
features that can be
come the basis of new
as
typologies?such
brief anecdotes
205
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PMLA
Frost, Robert.
1957.
as a Foreign
The Good
Language:
of Poetry. Saint Paul: Grey wolf, 1999.
"IWake
and Feel the Fell of
Gerard Manley.
Fulton, Alice.
Feeling
Strangeness
2. Epideictic
rhetoric, Walker
argues, derives from
archaic lyric and, unlike pragmatic rhetoric, is directed
to an audience
that does not make decisions but forms
Hopkins,
Jackson, Virginia.
ton UP, 2005.
a society or culture
lives" (9).
Crossings ofModern Po
Philosophy. South Bend: U of Notre
The Extravagant:
Baudelaire,
Charles.
de Banville."
Browning,
Robert.
John Pettigrew.
349-50. 2 vols.
Culler,
Jonathan.
Ithaca: Cornell
Dickinson's
Princeton:
Misery.
Prince
Works Cited
Baker, Robert.
MacKenzie.
The Poems.
Yale UP,
The Pursuit
"Apostrophe."
1981. 135-54.
UP,
Ed.
1981.
of Signs.
Plato. Protagoras.
Ed. Edith Ham
Collected Dialogues.
Cairns. New York: Bollingen,
ilton and Huntington
1961. 308-52.
Villon,
Francois.
"Ballade
des dames
Walker,
Wellek,
Rene.
du temps jadis."
1970. 31-33.
inAntiquity. Oxford:
Discriminations.
Wimsatt,
Brooks.
1956. 212-13.
Literary Criticism:
1957.
Collected
Poems.