LYRIC

Readings
-Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn, Hofmann
-Trying to Praise the Mutilated World: The Contemporary American Ode, Ann
Keniston, in A Companion to Poetic Genre [UQ Online]

Planets on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life,

Byran and Olson
Introduction
-Reading: It has been our experience that reading is at the very least the first part of
the creative process, and itself a creative actmysterious and fluctuating,
alternatively baffled and rapt, questioned and questioning: like writing vii
-Lastingness: Read Goldbergs essay on the responsibility of poetry to the body and
you go beneath even that, to the suggestion of a language which desire speaks after
death.an unslakable human thirst for various forms of lastingness. xi
-Love: These essays are love storiesnot rose-coloured romances, but love that
includes doubt, violence, wrestling with angels and devils. Love of details, love that
sweeps you away, batters your heart, drowns you, binds youdangerous love, daily
love, quiet love, devoted love. Love that calls us to the things of this world, love that
reveals infinite other worlds xi
In the Music Room, Robin Behn
-The poets Robins reading: Edna St. Vincent Millay, WS Merwin, Zbigniew Herbert,
Gertrude Steins Tender Buttons, Symborska
-Pain and depth: It was that the woman had felt the pain of others to this depth and
found words for it and lived that made me believe in the venture of poetry 5
-Large and universal: not to be embarrassed by large feeling 5 ; I think it is the
heart that leads in Millayher ability to feel emotion stronglyand her deft use of
formal devices, her wild and sudden shifts from restrained to unabashed phrasing, that
allow the heart to be revealed. A poem, like the actors body, has all aspects to it, and,
when it is spoken, there is a part that leads 7
-Emotion and the Inexpressible: Bachs Sonata for Flute in E Minor had always had
the same effect on me, but it was a secret effect, the emotion without the words for the
emotion 5
-Millays poem: and long / To gather up my little gods and go 7
-Millays Renascence: The soul can split the sky in two 9
-Soul: Merwins slippery units of speech, with their indefinite beginnings and
endingsthat made reading like deciphering a chord written for piano, the notes
sounding simultaneously, some overlapping while others fade awayhad a way of
tempting me into a realm beyond this realm, the roomless room of soul 9 ; I dont
know how it looks when an actor leads with the soul as he or she crosses a stage, but I

know it when I see it 10

-Gertrude Steins Tender Buttons: I let the sentences make the shape of a circle and
I stand in the middle smiling. Stein, as much by my need for her to do this to me as by
what might be her intentions, is like the echo chamber at St. Pauls Cathedral. If you
climb up there needing to know something and whisper it to the wall, the dome will
speak and speak 10
-Wislawa Symborskas The End and the Beginning: After every way/ someone has
to tidy up 11
Required Reading, J.D. McClatchy
-Readings of Wallace Stevens, Proust, Tolstoy
-Wallace Stevens: One of my teachers in college had once squired Holly Stevens
around, and her father gave him a copy of his Collected Poems with this inscription:
Dear Elias: When I speak of the poem, or often when I speak of the poem, in this
book, I mean not merely a literary form, but the brightest and most harmonious
concept, or order, of life; and the references should be read with that in mind. The
angelic orders of life 19
-Proust and Tolstoy: there is not a single human emotion that they dont know and
understand and sympathize with 23 ; Profundity, said Paul Valery, is a hundred
times easier than precision. Gesture, intonation, the cock of head, the fit of a sash
no detail is overlooked, and each serves a moral purpose. 23
-Proust: near the novel Proust writes, But excuses have no place in art and intentions
count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this
that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last
judgment 25
-Auden: There is no love; / There are only the various envies, all of them sad (In
Praise of Limestone, from other source)

The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney

Introduction
-crossing the domain of the matter-of-fact into the domain of the imagined ; the
frontier of writing 10
-Thomas Hardys poem Afterwards (familiar and unfamiliar, green, eyes, blink) 11
-Entry to poetry: consciousness is given access to a dimension beyond the frontier
where an overbrimming, totally resourceful expressiveness becomes suddenly
available; and this entry into a condition of illuminated rightness becomes an entry
into poetry itself 13 ; offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments,
foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways,
it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike 15
-poetry brings human existence to a fuller life 13
The Redress of Poetry
-*force, gravity, grace, redress, redress is a counterweighting, a balancing out of
forces, tilting the scales of reality toward some transcendent equilibrium, a reality that
can only be imagined but nevertheless has weight 16; poetry is fulfilling its
counterweighting function. It becomes another truth to which we can have recourse,
before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way 20 [weight]

-[redress] p22: Heaney explains how redress grows palpable, Borgesian circularity, a
poetry where the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to
contemplate the complex burden of our experience ; p27: meanings of redress,
finding a course for the breakaway of innate capacity
-solitary role of witness, spiritual stamina, Vaclav Havels hope, it is an orientation
of the spirit, its deepest roots is in the transcendental, it is not the conviction that
something turns out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of
how it turns out [Incline] 16

Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style, in

Goethe on Art, Goethe [G-Book]
-Nature, Manner, Style (style captures the profoundest of knowledge, on the essence
of things insofar as we can recognize it in visible and tangible forms 22)
-Goethe uses examples of flowers and fruit 22 ; Style: enlighten us by his accurate
representation of these characteristics 23)

Knowing Apples, Shannon

-uncommon senses 3
-I was potentially both an animal and vegetal being 3 ; vegetal life 3
-intention to portray more than explain 5
-vegetative soul 5 --- to accept the right of flourishing in its own way 5 ; an intrinsic
force, an inventiveness propelled by non-conscious intentionality 6 ; Christopher
Bollas calls it as the unthought known, or thinking an idea struggling to have me
think it 6
-between form and chaos 5

On Plato
Mitisi, Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics
-Synopsis:
Mitisis essay indicates that food metaphor has been used in the debate of the
legitimacy of poetry in a society in the sixteenth century. It has been used as
defending as well as opposing poetry by literary critics and philosophers. In ancient
Greece, Plato in his Republic condemned poetry that it nourishes our worst part,
and it feeds and waters the growth of passions that should be allowed to wither
away 1. In the sixteenth century, Stephen Gosson in his The Schoole of Abuse
(1579) compares poets to cooks; he identifies poetry with indulgence, conspicuous
consumption and expense 2. He follows Plato to argue that poetry and drama are
morally disruptive, and therefore should be banned from a reformed
commonwealth 2. He also claims that poets mislead and seduce their audiences
into a whole array of vices and abuses 2. Gosson produces a moral play called
Praise at Parting. Gossons attack prompted responses from Thomas Lodge and Sir
Philip Sidney. Lodge wrote A Reply to Stephen Gossons The Schoole of Abuse in
Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays in 1580. Sidney wrote Apology for Poetry
in 1595. Lodge compares poets to physicians rather than cooks. Poetry is the means to
revive both the body and the soul. Lodge affirms the social value of poetry. Sidney
asserts that Gosson misread Platos assault against poetry as Plato, according to

Sidney, banish[ed] the abuse not the thing (qtd. Sidney). He uses food metaphor to
substantiate his view. He uses the food metaphor to emphasize the transformational
power of poetry 7: Poets mediate between the raw product and its human consumer,
between the physical world and the subject, combing sustenance with pleasure (LeviStraus notion of cooking) 8. To Sidney, poetry is a combination of wisdom and
pleasure rather than mere pleasure as Plato and Gosson assert. Sidney also recuperates
the significance of food in order to reaffirm the value of poetry: the contemporary
view of digestion as a very literal assimilation of something that is not part of one to
the essence of ones being (Schoenfeldt 245) corresponds to Sidneys view of the
profound effects of poetry on its readers 8. The punishment of the belly is the
punishment of ones life 8. Hence, Sidney compares the poet to the food for the
tenderest stomachs, likens poetry to food throughout his treatise, descrbing it as a
cluster of grapes (340) and a medicine of cherries (341) 1. Sidney says that it is
not poetry that abuseth mans wit, but that mans wit abuseth poetry (350) 9.
Indeed, Mitisi claims that Sidneys reasoning is sensible: 1. Plato, as Arthur Kinney
suggests, sees that passions are aroused by ideas in virtuous ways, and a poet and a
philosopher with such passions are neither clever nor desperate sophistry, but a
thought and logical position that fused philosophy and poetry with life 7-8.; 2.
Sidneys emphasis on the capacity of poetry to teach delightfullyis Platonic, since it
was Plato who insisted that poetry if ever admitted at all in the ideal Republic should
be morally instructive (Hardison 78) 8.

Fillmore, Lectures on Deixis (1971) [Copy]

-Synopsis: Fillmore discusses the non-deictic and deictic conception and expressions
of time and space. For non-deictic semantics of expressions, he illustrates the how the
spatial axis and temporal axis, reference object/spatial reference point, reference
period/temporal reference point serve to locate objects and events in space and time.
He brings forth the ideas of dimensionality, directionality, and extremity
(edge/part/corner) as the concepts enacted in non-deictic semantics of expressions. On
the other hand, deictic space and time expressions cover social deixis and discourse
deixis, both of which include the concepts of time deixis and place deixis.

Ch.1: May We Come in

-Alternation of authority role in question and answer: the usage of this 9 10
-Come and deixis: the description of the presuppositional structure of motion
sentences containing this verb requires reference to all three types of deixisperson,
place, and time 12
-The verb come: The verb comedoes not give us this option, because this word
is a pure motion word that does not have associated with it any notion of means,
medium or manner of movement 17
-Appropriateness of a conversation utterance: The conversation rules of the language
govern not only the conditions under which it is appropriate to perform the
permission-requesting utterance of the type we have been examining, but they must
also determine the principles by which a speaker of English is able to recognize
appropriate responses to the request 15
-Significance of deixis: In this lecture I have argued that there are principles of
linguistic description which should be geared in some ways to deictically anchored
sentences.In my succeeding lectures I will emphasize the deictic aspects of

language, exploring in turns notions of space, time, movement, the ongoing

discourse, and the reflexes in language of the identity of the participants in a
conversation and their relationships to each other. My goal in this lecture series is
to show how the phenomena of deixis impose a number of serious empirical,
conceptual, and notational problems for grammatical theory 18

Ch.2: Space
-Fillamore illustrates the deictic and the non-deictic conceptions of space 19.
Deictic conception of space has to do with the positing of a point of view, which
involve the location of the speaker at the time of the speech act; the relevancy of the
location of the speaker at the time of the speech act is essential to understand the
situation 19. Fillamore uses prepositions to illustrate the dimensionality
ascription and presuppositions in order to elucidate the non-deictic conceptions
of space.
-Prepositions [Dimensionality & Proximity]: correspond to the ascription of
different dimensionality properties to the entity named by the following noun or noun
phrase 20, Frequently the same noun has different interpretations depending on
what dimensionality property is assigned it by the accompanying preposition 20 ,
at (no dimension)/ on (two-dimensional: line or surface)/ in (three-dimensional:
the interior) 20, these at/no/in prepositions cover the concepts of simple location,
surface (unbounded) and interior (bounded) 21
-The categories of interior bounded spaces [Dimensionality & Proximity]: i.
horizontally bounded spaces ; ii. lower bounded spaces ; iii. upper-bounded spaces ;
iv. filled spaces 21
-Relative distance [Orientation and Distance]: horizontal and vertical orientations,
vertical orientation is up/down orientation, horizontal orientations include front/back
and left/right orientations, the left/right orientation is possible for an object only if
that object has BOTH an up/down orientation and a front/back orientation 22 ; special
orientational priority: front 23 ; back: in English the word back is associated with
the meaning the outer part of the body closest to the spinal column 24 ; left/right
24-2 : For animals or objects which have some surface similarity to humans, left and
right are determined by completing the analogy, that is, by centering our own topbottom-front-back framework into it and identify its left and right only by knowing
top from bottom and front from back. The choice seems to depend on the way in
which human beings position themselves with respect to objects 25 ; Side: The
English word sideis used to designate any smooth facet of an object which has not
been designated as a top or bottom extremity or as a front or back extremity 26
-Measurements of objects that are viewed as having a spatial orientation [Orientation
and Distance]: the adjectives that accompany these measurement indications are
selected according to a number of assumptions we make about the salient dimensions
and the specific spatial orientation of the objects in question 27 ;
high/long/wide/deep 28
-Movement [Orientation and Distance and Dimensionality]: via/over/through 2829, the prepositions of Location/Source/Path/Goal 29, dimenstionality
presuppositions are associated with the descriptions of movement/locomotion 29,
static (locative) and moving/directional (locomotive)

Ch. 3: Time
-Time is conceptually simpler than space since it only has one dimension and is
unidirectional 30. In the third lecture Fillamore talks about non-deictic conceptions

of time 31, which operate along the front/back axis, with indicators as before/after,
ahead/behind, earlier/later, earliest/latest, beginning/end. First,
earlier/later set up the temporal axis and the idea of the reference period.
Second, the indicated period is either being part of or outside of the reference period.
Third, if it is part of the reference period, the proximity and distance will be indicated
with the terms ahead/behind, or terms pointing to the extremity of the reference
period, beginning/end. Fourth, if it is out of the reference period, it will be indicated
with before/after 32-33
-Time is one dimensional and unidirectional: earlier and later (sequence) ;
front/back orientation can be thought as ahead/behind in movement 31; Before/
After or Ahead/ Behind are the movement metaphors for time 31, that these
movement metaphors are conceived along front/back axis one way or the other
depends on whether we regard time as stable and the continuing world as being in
motion, or whether the continuing world is taken as the stable reference point and
time is thought of as being in motion 31-32 ; Earlier/ Later are not movement
metaphors but simply temporal notions 32, beginning / end indicate duration and
hence the earliest and latest time points
-Proximity and Distance: The nouns front and back indicate portions of the
reference object, the phrases in front of and in back ofwithout the definite article
or words ahead and behind indicate position outside of the reference object but
along the front/back axis. The temporal axis is set up by the earlier/later relationship
between events. A time period has an extent along this axis, and locations in time
can be thought of as positioned with respect to a given time period along the temporal
axis. The position of a time period outside of the reference period calls for the
prepositions before and after, the earlier and later extremities of the reference
period being indicated by words beginning and end. And like the words front and
back, top and bottom, the words beginning and end can be used either for
naming extremities or portions of the time period 32-33
-Temporal Axis: With the temporal axis, the earlier/later orientation is permanently
set, and the beginning and end portions of a time period are not conceivable
independently of the earlier/later ordering relation in time 33 ; time periods and time
points 33 ; event types recurring in time 33 ; recurrences of the same phase of the
cycle are used for providing units of measure 33 ; [time measure words: fixed-phase
units] time measure periods taken only as units of measure are noncalendric while
time measure periods having fixed starting points are calendric 34 ; [time measure
words: fixed-length sequences] derivative units constructed by humans beings
consisting of partitions of the naturally given time units or sequences of the natural
units 34 ; explicitly bounded and less explicitly bounded time periods 34 ; positional
time indicators indicate a position within a sequence 36 ; expressions not identifying
calendar units can indicate relations of priority, coincidence and containment 38 ;
completive and durative verbs together with prepositional phrases 38 ;
actual/expected/theoretical time of an event (prolong/ postpone) 39

Ch.4: Deixis I
-Deictic: that context defined in such a way as to identify the participants in the
communication act, their location in space, and the time during which the
communication act is performed. Aspects of language which require this sort of
contextualizaton are what I have been calling deictic 41-42 ; Deictic anchoring ;
taking into the consideration of the subjects point of view in relation to the
surroundings, so the consideration of deictic is mediating between the subject and

the object
-Deictic anchoring: Specify speaker, addressee and audience 43 ; Place and time
deictic terms 43 ; Three ways of using deictic terms: gestural, symbolic, anaphoric
43 ; non-deictic indications depend on the understanding of something being oriented
in space in a particular way 46 ; time deixis/coding time/the time of the
communication act 47 ; time deixis: many locutions about time involve spatial
metaphors based on the notion of movement. It is on the moving world version of the
metaphor that we can speak of the future as being ahead and the past as being behind
(this coming Tuesday, the days ahead) 52

Ch.5: Coming and Going

-Come is towards and Go is not towards 54 ; The deictic motion verbs in
English are Come, Go, Take, Bring 54 (So bringing-forth, poiesis, is a
forward movement, attaining proximity)
-Locomotion: We say of something that it has moved, in the locomotion sense of
movement that I have in mind, if it is at one location at one time and at another
location at another time.I will discuss bounded motion, motion that can be
characterized as having a starting point and an ending point an origin and a
destinationwhat I have been calling Source and Goalwe can also characterize or
delimit in some way the intervening states which we call, after David Bennett, the
Path 55 ; Motion, thus, presupposes an understanding of both time and space 55
-Reference time and Reference space in Locomotion/Viewing Communication as
analogous with Motion (57): reference period of time and reference point of time,
arrival time and departure time, presupposed time period and presupposed location 55
; reference place (the location or object that is taken as the framework or spatial
reference point for what is mentioned in the clause) 56 ; place/time parallelism exists
on the deictic level in terms of coding time, encoding time, decoding time 56-57,
coding place, encoding place, decoding place 57
-Bring: the enabling, the conducting, the conveying senses of bring 63

Ch.6: Deixis II
-This chapter deals with discourse deixis and social deixis
-Discourse deixis: any point in a discourse can be thought of as a point in time 73 ;
The demonstratives this and that have their uses in referring to an immediately
preceding and an immediately following portion of the discourse, respectively 74 ;
this has the idea that one of the participants knows what it is that is being referred to
but the other does not, and with that it is assumed that both encoder and decoder
know what is being talked about 74 ; But this also has a backward-pointing function
as well as a forward-pointing function 74 (this was restricted to past perfect tense in
its backward-pointing function) ; the words the former/the latter are also discourse
deictic terms 74
-Discourse deixis in conversation: the presentation of the total design of a text 75 ;
external analysis 75-77 and internal analysis (social deixis) 78
-Social deixis: Social deixis is the study of that aspect of sentences which reflect or
establish or are determined by certain realities of the social situation in which the
speech act occurs 79 ; person-deictic anchoring in terms of the speakers taking the
addressees point of view 85

Jonathan Culler
Culler, Reading Lyric
-Summary: Cullers essay Reading Lyric is based on his review of Paul de Mans
essay Trope and Anthropomorphism in the Lyric. Culler also discusses de Mans
essay in his book The Theory of the Lyric when he talks about the questions on lyric
as a genre. In the book, Culler quotes de Mans pairing of Baudelaires poems
Obsessions and Correspondences as a demonstration of how the qualities of the
lyric are always underneath even the non-lyric. He argues that there always appears to
be a poem which can disrupt and yet elicit (but not completely equalizes itself to) the
generic expectations of a lyric. In this essay Reading Lyric, Culler states the idea of
lyric is dependent on how the readers read the lyric. So, the question of asking What
is lyric is somewhat embarrassing. Culler says, Someone taking this view can argue
that no text really is a lyric but that, as de Man puts it, these are merely nostalgic
categories for classifying and mastering texts 6. Yet, Culler thinks that there appears
to be something that can be called lyric, as de Man delivers a puzzling statement:
No lyric can be read lyrically, nor can the object of a lyrical reading itself a lyric 6.
From de Mans assertion Culler thinks that, quoting William Ray, the conceptions that
de Man gives weight can hardly be reconciled, such as, in this case, lyric and
reading.
Culler here in this essay Reading Lyric tries to delineate and discuss the suggestive
statements that ask what a lyric is in Paul de Mans essay Trope and
Anthropomorphism in the Lyric. The essay lays out Cullers critical responses to de
Mans essay with regard to what is lyric. First, Culler mentions de Mans view of
lyric and lyrical reading. De Man, says, No lyric can be read lyrically, nor can the
object of a lyrical reading itself a lyric. De Man seems opposing a structuralist
approach to the genre of lyric. Culler analyses that De Mans examination of the
nature of lyric is through the act of lyrical reading which, interestingly, is resisting and
disrupting the lyrical reading. De Man interprets such a reading, as Culler says, a
transformation of the trope into anthropomorphism. This transformation includes a
transition: i. from the phenomenal to the essential; ii. from a chain of elements into an
unified whole of assertion; iii. from analogy to identification; iv. from subject-object
relation to intersubjective relation 5. Anthropomorphism is not an idea to define lyric;
rather, it is trying to suggest what a lyric. It is similar to an interface to approach what
a lyric is. It is not what a lyric is. So, de Man is answering the question of what is a
lyric by describing the phenomenality of the poetic voice in lyric instead of the
materiality of language. Second, Culler follows the idea of phenomenality by saying
quoting de Mans words: The lyric depends entirely for its existence on the denial of
phenomenality as the surest means to recover what it denies. Culler quotes Parker
and C. Hoseks suggestion that [t]he principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry,
depends on the phenonmenalization of the poetic voice. The phenomenalization
refers to the idea that there is given perception a body of sensible signifiers which
stand in representational relation to conceptual signifieds that are given to
understanding. So the phenomenalization of the poetic voice challenges the cognitive
understanding of the lyric due to the presence of the sensual. The phenomenality of
language comes in or is revealed in the potentially endless patterns that might or
might not signify. 8 That is, the phenomenality of language posits a reading of lyric

as an exposition of its constitutive conditions which are scarcely defining 9. Culler

thinks that what is left from de Mans essay is an idea to perform the lyrical readings
on the lyric and to see how the readings, which come from the disruption and
resistance between the sensual and the conceptual in language, and so we can
reconstruct and deconstruct the dymystificatory infratexts 10. This flux and flex of
reconstructing and deconstructing is how the act of reading lyric defines the nature of
lyric: the denial of phenomenality as the surest means to recover what it denies.
-Paul de Man: No lyric can be read lyrically, nor can the object of a lyrical reading be
itself a lyric 2
-Northrop Frye: defines lyric as utterance overheard in The Anatomy of Criticism 3 //
Culler: This turning away from the listeners to address absent or imagined
interlocutors is the trope of lyric 3
-Lyric as a genre: expecctations, assumptions, internal symbolic patterns and external
tropological relations // Culler: De Man is less interested in these conventions than in
the idea of lyric as utterancean idea fostered by New Criticism, which in effect
treated lyrics as dramatic monologues (a fictional imitation of personal utterance) 3
-Apostrophe: the empty O is embarrassing as it seems that the lyrics apostrophe as
one can scarcely makes cognitive or transcendental claims of this sort that are
routinely made for metaphor 3 // the figure of address/the figure of voice/the figure of
the lyric subject [the subject is not the apple but how the poet addresses the apple,
how the figure of address is turned from the apple to the way he addresses the apple]
-The figure of address is important in the Ode:

4
-What is the difference between description and address as in lyric/ode?
-Paul de Man: Apostrophe, Prosopopoeia, Anthropomorphism, Giving a literal face to
an entity, foregrounding the intersubjective (the I-You) relation 4 ; Paul de Mans
definition of anthropomorphism 4:
i. from the phenomenal to the essential
ii. from a chain of elements into an unified whole of assertion
iii. from analogy to identification
iv. from subject-object relation to intersubjective relation 5
a. setting up relations of commensurability and specularity between subject and object
5
b. setting up a relation between the inside and outside such that qualities, like echoes,
can be passed back and forth and poses question of whether patterns are projected
from outside to inside or from inside to outside 5
-Paul de Man: Prosopopoeia is not a defining constituent of lyric 7

Theory of the Lyric

Introduction and Ch.1
-His book Theory of Lyric originated from his work on Apostrophe (1975 essay, the
strange habit of lyric address was central to lyric tradition) (Theory of Lyric, Preface
pdf 1) --- Structural Poetics --- Poetics, poetics takes over hermeneutics, poems do not
exist to be interpreted, but rather I was concerned above all with the moves by which
readers generate interpretations when confronted with a poem. I saw poetics as an

attempt to make explicit the moves of the interpretive process, to systematize the
operations of literary criticism, offer some account of the range of historical
possibilities that they make available (Theory of Lyric, Preface pdf 2)
-Ambivalence about twentieth-century reading of lyric

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 21)

-In Introduction of Theory of Lyric, Culler talks about the changes in the critical
approach of lyric, the conception of lyric: from representation of subjective
experience to representation of the action of a fictional speaker. But this model has
limitations: it neglects most salient features of lyric, including rhythm and sound
patterns, and intertextual relations. He quotes that Bakhtin and Barthes devalue lyric
as compared to novel or other forms of prose. There has been a lack of rich theoretical
discourse about lyric. Cullers project is to investigate the inadequacies of current
models and to explore alternatives by examining possibilities inherent in the Western
lyric tradition. Culler always asks who is the speaker, where he is speaking, what
and why he is speaking, to whom he is addressing, for what purpose he is
speaking, he is always thinking about the context of utterance and the
significance, the centrality, and the availability of it

(Theory of Lyric, Preface pdf 9)

-Lyric is given more literary attention in Romantic period (Theory of Lyric,
Introduction pdf 1) when its mimetic function of expressing the individual subjects
experience is more acknowledged (Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 1), the lyric as
representation of subjective experience by Hegel, Romantic poets (Theory of Lyric,
Introduction pdf 2) ---

(Theory of Lyric,
Introduction pdf 2) --- i.e. the reader looks for a speaker who can be treated as a
character in a novel, whose situation and motives one must reconstruct. (Theory of
Lyric, Introduction pdf 2) --- the goal of reading a lyric is to produce a new
interpretation (Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 5)

Ch.2 Lyric as Genre

1. On Genre Study
-Summary on Genre Categorization: Culler reviews the significance of the discussion
on genre with regard to the literary field in general. He begins Maurice Blanchots and
Benedetto Croces ideas on genre categorization. Blanchots problematizing genre
categorization and Croces opposing genre categorization, to Culler, bring forth the
rationale behind the discredits given to generic categorization more than a complete
nullification of its significance. Culler indicates that Blanchot, through his
discrediting generic categorization, foregrounds the distinctive literariness of each
literary work, while Croce opposes the concept of genre as it had been as a rule that
limits literary creativity. So Culler goes on to manifest the significance of genre
categorization which actually can help re-affirming the singularity of literary work.
He says that genre study is vehicle to look at the historical dimension of the literary
works. It is not just describing or recalling what the literary critics talk about a
specific genre. It is more about evaluating the categorizing criteria in that particular
historical context, and reflecting upon the discrepancy of the emerging literary work
which disrupts the traditions.
-Maurice Blanchots The Book to Come on the idea of genre and literature: like
Sandlers article On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film: black essence of
existence from Robert Frost 3 --- Blanchot, as Culler said, is describing a modern
attitude towards generic categorization more than challenging the reality of genres 3
-Discrediting the concept of genre:
---Maurice Blanchot: problematizing the generic categorization and foregrounding the
distinctive literariness of each literary work
---Benedetto Croce: opposing the concept of genre which is seen as a rule as it limits
creativity
---Cullers conclusion: i. the notion of genre as a set of rules ; ii. the use of genre as a
means to classify works

4
-There signs recognizing the importance of generic categories, as Culler claims:
---Literary works emerge against the generic conventions, disrupting or conforming to
them 4
---Genres change as new works are created that either modify the categories, or,
eventually, delimit them differently in creating new categories 5
---Genre study gives the complexity of thoughts in our procedures to analyse and
accumulate knowledge in literary criticism 5
-Genre study is the most interesting when most specific 6 ; the question of genre
provides insight into the history of the literary tradition and the functioning of
literature, as well as, of course, the development of that genre in response to the

diversified complexities agitated in contextual undulations 6

6
-The working classifications: Genres can be seen as traditions (biological genes) 7, as
social institutions created by constitutive conventions/the functioning in a system 7 ;

9
So Culler is indicating the vibrancy of generic category from the lens of its historical
dimension:

10
Culler takes it further that genre study should not be just describing what people of a
particular period thinks about the genre, but more importantly about evaluating their
thoughts if there are inadequacies

10

10

11
---2. On Lyric History
-Summary: Culler maps out the history of Western lyric from antique Greeks to the
nineteenth century. Lyric first started as a type of poetry involving thematic

circumstances and meters correlated with the mode of performance. Lyric poets were
singers. Pindar was a typical example. Lyrics in antique Greece are defined by the
performative quality and public role as morals or ethics teaching. Aristotle and Plato
did not treat lyric as a legitimate genre as compared to epic and drama. Lyric, to their
mind, was a mimetic work accompanied with music, and it should be evaluated
whether it could conform to the ethical and political values. Four hundred years after
Pindar, Horace readapated Pindars odes for more meditative uses, as singing the
more quotidian dimension of an individual life. Catullus, around the era of Horace,
born 20 years before Horace, reshaped the lyric as in-depth love poems. Troubadour
lyrics were gaining significance in the Miditerranean area around the Middle Ags,
where love songs, drinking songs, and sacred lyrics flourished. And, with the Antonio
Minturno (1563) and Sir Philip Sidney (1579) giving lyric a legitimacy as a genre on
a par with epic and drama, lyric was gradually becoming a poetic norm. In the 18th C,
Sir William Jones, the German aesthetician J.G. Sulzer, and Madame de Stael reckon
lyric as a genre expressing feelings more than representing the world outside, and
lyric is becoming the literary mode which is expressive more than mimetic.
-Thinking on Western lyric from the Greeks to the nineteenth century:
---Greeks: lyrics are the types of poetry involving thematic circumstances and meters,
which are correlated with mode of performance 11 ; lyric was a major strain of
archaic Greek poetry 12
---Origin of Praise: In Aristotles Poetics, Aristotle himself offers a speculative
genealogy, deriving all poetic genres from lyric encomia, hymns, and invectives 12 ;
Gregory Nagy and Jeffrey Walker think that lyric precedes and generates epic as well
as epideictic and panegyric rhetoric in general 12 ; Cullers says that it is clear that the
link between lyric and discourse that aims to praise or persuadeepideictic discourse
is strong in archaic Greece and persists through Renaissance 12 ; Under the Roman
Empire, there was a shift in the conception of rhetoric from techniques for efficacious
discourse to techniques for eloquence, and lyric poetry, esp. in its epideictic
dimensions, as poetry of praise, became more closely associated with rhetoric and
cited by rhetoricians 23. This can be seen in Longinus On the Sublime on Sapphos
poem 24 (Sappho: the helplessness and the inexpressible, embodying a turn where
suffering becomes a source of poetic power 26)
---The sudden profusion of lyric took place in ca 700 BCE due to the invention of
writing 13, as Leslie Kurke writes 13, singers became makers 13, and by 500 BCE,
lyric, though still treated as accompanied by music, was treated as text to be repeated
and evaluated 14
---Aristotles Poetics: Aristotle didnt treat lyric poetry as a major literary genre in his
discussion of mimetic poetry. He treated lyric poetry as a minor component of
tragedy, being the sung parts of tragedy: lexis and melopoeia are two media in which
mimesis is rendered in tragedy 13
---Platos dialogues: Book 3 of Republic distingushes poetry by mode of enunciation.
He calls a poem dithyramb in which the poet speaks in his own person only, as
contrasted with drama and epic 14 ; By 500 BCE, lyric utterance is taken as a
statement to be judged for its conformity to ethical and political values 14
---Aristophanes of Byzantine in 200 BCE: promoted a canon of nine lyrcists, which
are Pindar, Alcaeus, Sappho, Alcman, Anacreon, Simnides. So in the subsequent
centuries of the Roman Empire, these poets were celebrated alongside the epic, tragic,
comic poets, iambic, and elegiac poets 14
---The work of the Alexandrain scholars in the late 300 and 200 BCE (third and

second centuries BCE) was crucial in the development of a framework for discussions
of discourse (rhetoric and poetics) in the West 15
---(Greece) Pindars 11th Olympian: an ode praising victor in a boxing match 15, the
standing-out of the lyric I, the singularity of a voice, and Bruno Snell aruges that
here in a lyric age, we witness the birth of the modern mind, as poets came to know
themselves as individuals with an inner life. 16 But the lyric I here, as Culler,
recognizes, is more the site of performing a role rathern expression of the poets
individuality, as Pindars I often involves epideictic assertions of what should be
valued (what is best, what is worthy, what we owe to gods) 16 // Characteristics of
Pindars odes: i. the lyric I is a site to perform a social role; ii. setting up social
values (what should be valued); iii. a public performance; iv. highlights the
performative quality // Cullers conclusion:

17
---(Rome) Horace, born 400 years after Pindar: Horace engages in complex
negotations with the figure of Pindar 19: i. He eschews Pindars sublime
grandiloquence and public performance of epic muth in the famous Ode 4.2 19

20
---Catullus, born 20 years before Horace: He is the first poet in Greek or Latin who
appears to write about a particular love affair in depth in a related collection of poems
21. His collection sets a stage for a coherent genre, Latin love lyric 23. Paul Allen
Miller, who idiosyncratically defines lyric as a collection of poems in which we seek a
narrative, deems Catullus the first lyric poet 23
---Roman poetry: Though writing and the book have become the medium of lyrics,
they retain a reference to the poem as event or performance 23
---Lyric makes only a minor appearance in late Latin and medieval texts 26, but
several developments are significant in the history of Western lyric: i. accentual
meters ; ii. hymns and rhymes ; iii. rich tradition of popular songs associated with
aspects of everyday life 27 ; iv. Medieval lyrics flourishing with love songs, drinking
songs, sacred lyrics 28. The trend is towards a wide array of complex stanza forms,
shorter lines, and swifter tempos 29
---Troubadour lyric: from the Miditerranean area, love songs
---No music accompanient in lyric in medieval lyric poetry in the 13th and 14th C, and
there is a growing tradition of lyrics not meant to be sung but used for private
meditation 30 and so lyrics offer the position of a definite but unspecified ego whose
positive the audience is invited to occupy 30

30

30
---Petriachs Canzoniere, Dantes Vita Nouva (1295) in Medieval Age, French poets
of 16th C celebrated Greek and Latin odes ; Antonio Minturno was the first to treat
lyric as a genre on a par with the epic and the dramatic in 1563, and he is the first to
use Aristotles Poetics to give lyric a legitimacy that Aristotle refused it 34 ; In
England Sir Philip Sidney singles out the lyric as a legmitate form of poetry 34, and
he retains the classical and medieval model of lyric as a rhetorical practice
Epideictic discoursewith the centrality of praise and blame, which makes it easier
to treat lyrics as significant poetic porductions 35
---Expressive theory of the lyric (From mimetic to expressive): Lyric is identified with
the ode especially and set against epic, didactic, and narrative poetry 35 ; lyric is
expressive of passion: Longinus On the Sublime ; 18th C reflections linking poetry to
the origin of language contributes to the idea that poetry is more natural and elemental
than prose, originally expressive rather than rhetorical 36 ; Scholars who rejected the
mimetic theory of lyric: Sir William Jones rejects the theory of poetry as imitation in
his essay On Arts, Commonly Called Imitative 36, the German aesthetician J.G.
Sulzer, Madame de Stael 37
---Lyric as a poetic norm and Resistance to lyric as poetic experimentation 39
3. Lyric Genre
-Synopsis: Culler discusses the conception of lyric through the ideas of thinking of
lyric as a genre. He says that expressive theory of lyric, which has become the poetic
norm of what a lyric by nature is, is both the stimului of standardizing lyric as a genre
and of challenging lyric as a genre. He uses Paul de Mans discussion of Baudelaires
two poems in de Mans essay Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric for
illustration. De Man states that of both Baudelaires poems, Obsessions is a lyric
while Correspondences contains, implies, produces, generates, permits the entire
possibility of lyric 43. Culler concludes that first, de Man presents the conception of
lyric is a way to present a potential reality of our engagement with the world 43;
second, the expressive model of lyric is limiting our conception of lyric; third, we
need a more capacious notion of lyric to counter the modern notions of lyric
intelligibility linked to the voice of the subject b82. The most important claim Culler
makes is seeing lyric as a historical more than a transcendental category makes the
conception of lyric resistant to a logic of historical determination, i.e. reading lyric,
with regard to the generic parameters of lyric tradition in a way that the tradition can
evolve with different possibilites, enlarges the possibilities of reading and engagement
with lyrics.
-Expressive theory of lyric gives rise to the recognition of lyric as a poetic norm as
well as the modern resistance to genre theory 39 i.e. anti-generic thinking bears
directly on the expressive theory of lyric 40 --- challenging the ideas/concepts of ode?

40
-Paul de Man: versions and variations of the inside/outside pattern of exchange //
internalization and exteriorization

42
-Paul de Man: Correspondences is not a lyric but it and it alone contains, implies,
produces, generates, permits the entire possibility of lyric 43

43
-Paul de Man: Generic term such as lyric (or its various subspecies ode) are terms
of resistance and nostalgia at the furtherst remove from the materiality of actual
history 43 ; Generic terms, such as lyric, like period terms, are only names for ways
of contingently ordering things so as to defend against the disorderly play of language
and history and make sense of the world b82
-Cullers reading of de Man: a. the conception of lyric presents a potential reality of
our engagement with the world ; b. the expressive model of lyric is limiting our
conception of lyric ; c. we need a more capacious notion of lyric to counter the
modern notions of lyric intelligibility linked to the voice of the subject b82

b82

b82
-Culler: From the view of Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, criticism has made a vast
range of poems into lyrics b83 ; ode is made to lurk under the generic category of
lyric 83 [ode as a subgenre] ; Emily Dickinson as an example b84 ; Cullers
conclusion on lyric genre: reading the poem to what extent in relation to the
pressupoed paramenters of the lyric tradition

b86
-Cullers stress on the fact that genre is a historical rather than a transcendental
category 89; This thinking of genre makes genre in a sense resisting the logic of
historical determination, i.e. A genre is not just a hisotrical evolution but a historically
evolving set of possibilities with potential to suprrise b90 ; Culler suggestions a more
capcacious/broader conception of lyric that enlarges and encourages the possibilities
of reading and engagement b90
Ch.3 Theories of the Lyric
Culler mainly mentions three major theories of lyric:
1. lyric as subjective form, real representation of the subject (Hegel)
2. lyric as a dramatic monologue, fictional speech act of an imagined speaker (Helen
Vendler, Barbara Herrnstein Smith)
3. lyric as performance (J.L. Austin)
1. Hegel
-Synopsis: Hegel provides an explicit theory of the lyric in his Aesthetics. In general,
his conviction is that lyric is the subjective genre of poetry 92. The centrality of
subjectivity that Hegel distinguishes lyric is different from the subjectivity in modern
sense 100. In modern sense, subjectivity refers to the consciousness of ones self
through reflection and experience. Hegels conception of subjectivity as the
distinguishing feature in lyric means more than the modern sense of subjectivity.
Hegels subjectivity is determined by the logic and architectonic of the whole
system in which a developmental logic of progressive idealization is undertaken
92. Culler says that [a]rt in general thus manifests for Hegel the progressive selfrealization of spiritincreasing spiritualization or idealization, s the material means
become less important 93. Poetry is the manifestation of a process of increased
spiritualization 100. The process is like this: The lyric poet absorbs into himself the
entire world of objects and circumstances and stamps them with his own inner
consciousness, also the lyric poet discloses his self-concentrated heart,raises
purely dull feeling into vision and ideas, and gives words and language to this rich
inner life (qtd. Hegel, 94). The poet in Hegels sense is a subject who through poetry
can realize itself as itself 95. He is not just an individual reflecting his own
individual experiences but a subject who is not able to purify and universalize the
individual experiences with the inner movement of the soul, so the subject (the poet)
can identify himself with this particularization of himselfso that in it he feels
and envisages himself. When the subject recognizes himself as himself (from
personhood to humanity) 95, the non-subjects (the readers besides the poet) can be
identified with the individuality of the experiences, that is, there is in front of us
something universally human so that we can feel in poetic sympathy with it 95.
Subjectivity as Hegels conception is a principle of unity rather a principle of

individuation 95 (*105).
Culler uses Kate Hamburgers discussion of The Lyrical Genre to redefine Hegels
conception of subjectivity in the theory of lyric in modern sense. Hamburger sees
lyric as real enunciation of real statement of a subject 105. The lyrical I is a
statement-subject, which is not exactly a personal I and not completely the
fictional I. It, in its enunciation in lyric, presents the indeterminacy between the
biographical individual and a fictional speaker 108. The assurance is that the lyrical
I performs a linguistic function in communication which is beyond the
communicative frontiers (historical, theoretical, or pragmatic, in Hamburgers
scheme), the function is embodied in communicating the statement of the subject and
its statements are real propositions of the experience of an object. The second
assurance is that the lyrical I performs the positing of itself (idea of Stewart on
positing ; positional function of the lyrical I) which can be referred to nothing but
the subject itself. The subject and the statement of the subject are real even they have
no function in a context of reality 106. The subject is real because there is really a
communicative function going on in terms of the positional function that the lyrical
I is performing; the statement of the subject is real because the statement is telling
the experiences of a genuine positioning subject, i.e. the lyrics do not project a
fictional world but make reality statements about his world 108. So,
Hamburger maintains Hegels theory that lyric as the subjective form, but she
gives a modern sense to Hegels theory by making it as a positional theory
(treating subjectivity as functional grammatical subject of a sentence, making it about
the types of language, differentiating the subjectivity of the subject and that of the
poet) 107.
2. Imitation Speech Acts
-Synopsis: Hegel sees lyric as a subjective form. He sees the poet as the subject who
organizes the materials through the inner movement of his soul and identifies himself
as himself in lyric through expressing the vision and ideas in lyric. The alternative to
the romantic theory of lyric as expression of the poets subjectivity is mimesis, which
suggests that lyric is the mimesis of the experience of the subject. It is the conception
of New Criticism and Modern Criticism. They insist the focus on the words and
wordings rather than the intentions of author. They treat the lyric as the expression of
a persona rather of the poet and thus a mimesis of the thought of speech of such a
persona created by the poet 109. If the speaker is the persona, the interpretation of the
poem becomes a matter of reconstructing the characteristics of this persona, esp.
the motives and circumstances of this act of speech, the focus becomes the drama
of attitudes expressed by this speaker-character 109. [The speaker is the persona
rather than a poet, the poem is the mimesis of the thought and speech of such a
persona, the interpretation of the poem is the reconstruction of the circumstances and
motives of the persona]. The representative scholars of this model of lyric as
fictional speech act are Helen Vendler and Barbara Herrnstein Smith 110. They put
forward a theory of lyric as dramatic monologue (each poem is a fictive speech of
an imagined speaker 110, the lyric is turned into a mini-novel with a character whose
motives are to be analyzed 111).
The limitations of the theory of lyric as dramatic monologue are: 1. It cannot be
applied to the poems which are public discourse about values in this world rather than
a fictional world, and these poems hold a long tradition in Western literature 115, 121.

These are the poems, like Pindars odes, claim to offer truths, to cast values in new
light, to ostensibly disclose aspects of the world and praise what should be noted and
remembered, but they claim especially to offer thought in memorable form 122, so
they are putting forward a distinctive vision of the worldnot a fictional universe
but our world 124 ; 2. It denies the effects of presentness of lyric utterance ; 3. It
denies the materiality of lyric language that makes itself felt as something other than
signs of a character and plot ; 4. It denies the rich texture of intertextual relations
that relates it to other poems rather than worldly events 119 ; 5. The theory cannot
address the sense of sudden emergence of new conceptual possibilities 122. In
general, the theory neglects the ritualistic dimension of lyric. This dimension refers
to the conception that lyrics are made for repetition, constructed by a re-performing
reader. This concept can be seen in Kendall Watsons proposition of poetry as
thought-writing in his Thoughtwritingin Poetry and Music, Alessandro
Barchiesis emphasis on the performative character of lyric in his Carmina: Odes and
Carmen Saeculare, and Roland Greenes assertion of the dialectical play of ritual and
fictional phenomena in his book Post-Petrarchism. The ritualistic dimension of lyrics
include: 1. the rhythm and repetition ; 2. lyric address ; 3. the performative
character of the lyric.
3. Performative and Performance
-Synopsis: The theory of performative language gives insights to literature. In this
theory, J.L. Austin, in his book How to Do Things in Words, sees utterances not as
constative but also performative, that is, utterances can accomplish the action to
which they refer 125, but not merely to describe a state of affairs or some prior state
of affairs, not being pseudo-assertions only. Derrida, in his article, Signature Event
Context, draws upon the link of the concept of performative language to the creative
power of language and to the problem of origination in general 126. Culler says,
[p]erformative acts may originate or inaugurate, create something new, 126. Culler
says that Austins account provides an alternative for the active, creative functioning
of language: language as act rather than representation 126. The epideictic
element of lyric, which is so central to the lyric tradition, exemplifies the
performativity in lyric, as the epideictic element of lyric includes not just praise or
blame but the many statements of value, statements about the world that suffuse lyric
of the past and the present.Lyrics do not in general performatively create a fictional
universe, as novels are said to do, but make claimsabout our world 128.
The performativity of lyric includes three aspects of the speech act: locutionary,
illocutionary, and perlocutionary. It becomes the theory of lyric as the
performativity of speech act. A lyric is the performance of the three aspects of the
speech act. So, the lyric is not just speaking but brings about that of which it
speaks. It is not just a locutionary utterance but also illocutionary (the act of speaking
the utterance in particular circumstances, that is linked with the presentness of lyric)
and perlocutionary (the effects that the poets are seeking to achieve by virtue of
producing a poem: effects such as moving readers, provoking reflection, leading them
to act differently, that is linked with the materiality of lyric) 130. With epideixis,
translated as discourse with an act aiming to persuade, to move, to innovate, the
epideictic element of the lyric exhibits as well the illocutionary and perlocutionary
aspects of speech act. This is the theory of lyric as performance not merely
performative. Culler lists a number of cases for executing the performativity of lyric:
1. brings into being that which it describes, related to the fictional aspect; 2. brings

forth the simple event of establishing itself as a lyric; 3. the poems success in
bringing about what it describes (creates the effects it says/aims to create in the
poem); 4. brings forth the poems functioning in the world through repeated readings,
and it can enter the language and social imaginary, giving us a world to inhabit 131

Ch. 4 Rhythm and Repetition

Culler in this chapter considers approaches to rhythm and repetition that highlight the
centrality of rhythm to the construction of the lyric and the experience of lyric 140.
Culler quotes Roman Jakobson, Northrope Frype, Paul Valery, TS Eliot, Yeats,
Nicholas Abraham, and Isobel Armstrong to assert rhythm as the distinguishing
character of lyric. Culler argues that lyric itself is an event, not a representation of
an event, and sound is what happens in the lyric, so rhythm is also the contributory to
the event-ness of lyric 137. Rhythm is an event without representation 138.
Rhythm makes lyric mediates between mind and body, and to a certain extent
breaks the mind/body binaries: Rhythm gives lyric a somatic quality that novels
and other extended forms lackthe experience of rhythm linking it to the body and,
perhaps, to the rhythms of various natural processesand thus contributes both to a
different sort of pleasure from those promoted by novels and to a sense of special
otherness: lyrics are language, but language shaped in other ways, as if from
elsewhere 138. Rhythm makes lyric felt like coming from another source, out of
the poet. Rhythm makes the reader occupy the position of the speaker: A reader
of verse, attentive to rhythms and verbal patterning, produces or articulates the text as
he or she hears it, occupying, however, temporarily, the position of the speaker 138.
Clive Scott: rhythm is the mediating force between text and reader, reader and self,
the place where these conflicting impulses of will play out their drama 139. Rhythm
has its seductiveness that it entices readers to read it again and again 139.
1. Meter
-Foot-prosody of unstressed and stressed syllables
-Derek Attridges four-by-four formation: the four groups of four beats
-Anthony Easthope: the four-stress meter is collective, popular, and natural, whereas
the iambic pentameter is a bourgeois impositionabstract, linear, essentializing.
Four-beat meters are communal chanting and iambic pentameter has an reinforcement
of individualism and individual realization 158
2. Rhythm
-Rhythm is a fusion of speaker and subject and it records the process of poiesis:
Culler cites Henri Meschonnic: Rhythm governs meanings as the continuous
movement of significance constructed by the historical activity of a subject. A
rhythm is the organization of the speaking subject in and by discourse 161.
-Extrinsically-segmented verse and intrinsically-segmented verse: Extrinsicallysegmented verse is not prompted by syntax or phrasal structure but is externally
imposed; the visual arrangement is crucial to the effect. Intrinsically-segmented verse
organizes lines according to the syntactic units or breath groups (David Attridge,
Poetry Unbound: Observations on Free Verse, in Moving Words)
-The somatic character of rhythm / the bodily experience of rhythm / the bodily,
experiential dimension of rhythm / our somatic participation in rhythm [ritual
dimension of lyric]: The meaning of a poem allegorically represents aspects of the
power of the poems own rhythm to bring about a physical response, to engage the
readers or listeners body and thus to disrupt the orderly process of meaning. Aviram

calls it the sublime power of rhythmsublime in that it resists or lies beyond efforts
of representation and can only be experienced, not comprehended 165 [charm-like
rhythmical solidity 166]. Aviram calls rhythm an allegorical power of lyric 168. This
is the sociality/impersonality of lyric 169.
(Amittai Avirams Telling Rhythms)
3. Sound and Repetition
-Seduction, repetition, memorality
-Impersonality of lyric: the more a poem foregrounds vocal effects,the more
powerful the image of voicing, oral articulation, but the less we find ourselves dealing
with the voice of a person. Poetic language rescripts the body into verbal language
once again, Blasing writes, and the language that keeps the pleasures of verbal sound
in play courtsexplicitly in incantatory or hypnotic versea hysterical regression,
jeopardizing the I, the linguistic construct of a psychosocial subject 176
-Rhyme can lend authority to lyric 183

Ch.5 Lyric Address

Culler acknowledges Northrope Fryes overhearing idea with regard to lyric
address, but --- a poetic device / a rhetorical strategy / taking the audience into
consideration --- positing an addressee
triangulation --- indirection --- Greek lyric, modern lyric, indeterminacy
Indirection --- addresed to another individual that indirectly address an audience 206,
address is a rhetorical strategy of triangulated address
1. Addres to Listeners or Readers
2. Addressing Other People
3. Apostrophe
Apostrophe, Culler 10 (as marks employed to denote different modifications of one
mind)

***

Follow-Up Readings:
-Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric
-Mark Payne, Ideas in Lyric Communication: Pindar and Celan, Modern Philology
105 (2007)
[how odes as a tradition of lyric in ancient Greece]
-Roland Greene, Post-Patrichism (lyric sequence, lyric discourse)
[ritualistic dimension, performance, song, values in the public, reiteration and
repetition, re-performing, rhythm and repetition, lyric address, the performative
character]
-Apostrophe:
---Ann Keniston, Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern
American Poetry, 2006
---in recent British Poetry, Nancy Pollard, Speaking to You, 2012
---John Ashbery, Interview, in The Craft of Poetry, ed. William Packard 123-124
---Ralph Johnson, The Idea of Lyric, 34, 13
---Barbara Johnsons Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion
---Douglas Neales Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered
---Baudelaire on Theodore de Banville
---Quintilian on apostrophe
---John Hollander, Rhymes Reason: A Guide to English Verse (Verse on Apostrophe)
-Ode:
---George N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats, 1940
-Horace:
---Cambridge Companion to Horace, Carmina: Odes and Carmen Saeculare
---Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse

---Two new collections of odes: Kenneth Kochs New Addresses, W.S. Merwins
Present Company

*Odes
-Odists: Pindar, Horace, Ronsard, Collins, Keats, Neruda, and Robert Lowell
-Ode is less a slippery and even dubious category compared with lyric 87
-How does lyric shine a light on the conception of ode if the fact that the poems are
seen as lyrics does not erase the subgenres? 88
-Hegel on odes: to odes, where the subjectivity of the poet becomes the most
important thing of all 95
-Hegel on Pindars odes 99: example of subjective inspiration, in Pindar there is an
exciting struggle 99 ; Horace is denigrated for deciding to make poems out of minor
events of his life 99
-Odes are not lyrics as imitation speech acts, as they claim to offer truths, to cast
values in new light, to ostensibly disclose aspects of the world and praise what should
be noted and remembered, but they claim especially to offer thought in memorable
form 122. These odes usually carry a sense of the sudden emergence of conceptual
possibilities 122.

Paul de Man
Paul de Man, Anthromorphism and Trope in the Lyric [in The
Rhetoric of Romanticism]
-reason, imagination, truth
-delivered in a series of lectures at Cornell in the Spring of 1983 ; as an invitation to
speak on the nature of lyric
-Chases comment on de Mans Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric: The
conceit of anthropomorphism, as this passasge goes on to characterize it, lies in the
fact that this particular rhetorical conceit excludes or desires the role of tropes or
figures in the process of representation, in favor of the recognition of essences.
Anthropomorphism is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance,
the taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to be given 83.
I think this is how Platos theory on form and substances comes to our stage of
discussion.

(Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law, by Barbara Johnson in Deconstruction:

Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4
Jonathan D. Culler)
-Obsessions (Feb 1860) was written five years after Correspondences (n.d.
anterior to 1855)
-Romantic and post-romantic lyric poetry: inside/outisde pattern as the subject

11
-Obssessions as the interiorization and exteriorization of Correspondances

11
-Lyric as the defensive motion of understanding, the possibility of future hermeneutics

13
-From trope to anthropomorphism is from Correspondences to Obsessions --from an army of tropes to truth 14 --- the double-ness of reading --- text and its
infra-text

Johnson, Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law [Copy]

-Johnson investigates what is a person with regards to the discussion of
anthropomorphism as definable and indefinable nature of lyric and the evaluation of
the nature of personhood in law.
-Proposition and Proper Name // anthropomorphism relies on the givenness of man
for its rhetorical effect 174
-De Man: literature as the place where this negative knowledge about the reliability
of linguistic utterance is made available. Negativity, then, is not an assertion of the
negative, but a nonpositivity within the possibility of assertion 165
-Problematicizing the defining 169
-Johnson: Perhaps the fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible is exactly what
legislators count on lyric poetry to provide the assumption that the human has been or
can be defined. The human can then be presupposed without the question of its
definition being raised as a question 177 // If man is a proper name not a
proposition, that is, man is given, and man is presupposed not defined. And that
presupposition is that man has been or can be defined, but not is to be defined 160
(slippage in defining, problematizing defining) // i.e. lyric cannot be defined, but it
needs the process of defining in order to problematize the defining, then the
indefinable nature of lyric can be revealed.

Chase, Giving a Face to a Name [Copy]

-Synopsis:
Chase illustrates de Mans analysis of the process of signification in the act of
reading. De Man sees prosopopoeia of a literary work in our act of reading functions
as positing voice or face by means of language (see de Mans Autobiography as
De-facement) 82. Prosopopoeia, according to de Man, is to give a face. De Man in
his book The Rhetoric of Romanticism the face he means. He says, Face is, first

of all, a speaking face, the locus of speech, the necessary condition for the existence
of articulated language (RR 89) 83. Face is not the same as the existence of a
person. It is implicative in the making of the existence of a person. Chase says, it is to
imply that a face is the conditionnot the equivalentof the existence of a person
83. It resonates with Fillamores Lecture on Deixis on how to determine positions and
hence the coordinates of time and space in face-to-face situations. The face is the
beginning of the imagination of speech and language. Prosopopoeia is different
from anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism, as de Man says in
Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric, as a rhetorical conceit excludes or
denies the role of tropes or figures in the process of representation, in favour of the
recognition of essences 83. Anthropomorphism naturalizes the human, and the
distinction between man and nature is effaced 83-84. Prosopopoeia foregrounds
humans dependency on the giving of a figure to exist in language, and such a figure
enables, as de Man says, the recognition of an entity or agency that bridges the
distinction between mind and world, and there asserts a belief that mind and world
can be in a dialogue when they are allowed to exist in proximity through the positing
of the human as a figure (RR 89) 83. The ideas of proximity and distance resonate
with Susan Stewarts concept of touching.
Face is a figure, Chase says. He elaborates, De Man not merely reads
prosopopoeia as the giving of face; he reads face as that which is given by
prosopopoeia 84. Prosopopoeia is face and vice versa. This equivalence is actualized
in rhetoric, that is, the use of language. Chase says, Face is not the natural given of
the human person. It is given in a mode of discourse, given by an act of language,
that is why face is a figure. It aspires to be taken on a level of substance, similar to
anthropomorphism, but the difference is that it remains as a trope or a figure without
being naturalized as essence. To give a face, that is, to make language as a figure, is to
claim a relationship between the mind and the world in a way that a process of
comparison and substitution, the system of tropes and figures whereby language
functions as representation or cognition 84. As a result, it also sets up a capacity to
see entities as interchangeable parts of a whole, that is, opens the way to compose
the entire intelligible world through a face 85. De Man, however, putting forward his
concept of prosopopoeia, is suggesting the opposite of the fact that language functions
as representation. Chase says, for de Man [a] rhetorical reading deconstructs these
concepts by revealing their dependency on the figure of metaphor 85, that is, by
revealing that it is such a dependency on the figure of metaphor that contributes to the
man-nature intermediation, that erases the differences between terms and integrate
them into wholes, that inaugurates the process of totalization, that proposes the
naturalness of man, that makes language function as representation, and that
ultimately consummates anthropomorphism. Yet, this apparent enabling possibility
of prosopopoeia is actually a predicament. This is where de Man begins to more finely
define prosopopoeia. [Note: Chase fins that in de Mans Anthropomorphism and
Trope in the Lyric, prosopopoeia is clearly defined distinct from personification and
anthropomorphism 83]
Prosopopoeia, Chase says, is not the giving of face, but a taking off of face; it is,
Chase calls, de-facement 85. Prosopopoeia is to deconstruct how the language is
made into a figure. It is the reading of language of figuration. The central paradox is:
a function of faceas the relentless undoer of its own claimshardly to be
reconciled with the meaning of face, with its promise of sense and filial preservation

(RR 92) 86. When does that de-facement happen? It is when the face is given to a
name, that is, when the giving of a face happens in language and the face is then
turned into an intelligible linguistic pattern, which confers a language property
on the face and the face becomes nominal. To give a face to a name is to textualize
the face in order to actualize it. To de-face is to actualize/reflect upon the
textualization of the face. Through the actualizing of the textualization of face, which
is different from the actualizing of the face, first, readers suspend the conception of
language as representation; second, reader recognize that language is not representing
a face but positing a face; third, the positing of a face indicates that there is a failure in
the capability of representation between a subject and an object; fourth, prosopopoeia
is the reading of the positing of face and such as reading reveals the figurality of face.
Chase says: The figurality of face is implied by the etymology of prosopopoeia; the
fictionality of voice, by its definition 88 (see 83: the making of a voice). De Man
links his explanation of prosopopoeia with catachresis and apostrophe. He uses
the idea of catachresis to explain the relationship between name and figure.
Catachresis transfers a name from another entity to an unnamed entity. It enables the
production of another figure while it abuses the figure by pulling a name to it, so
Chase says: Naming takes place by production of figures whose figurative status is
simultaneously effaced 88. The paradox in catachresis is that figuration is only
actualized through being eliminated. Chase describes: Catachresis thus describes
a dependency and conflict between name and figure that is present in the concept
of giving a face 88. To give a face is to de-face, while to de-face a face has to be
given. Apostrophe confers the power of speech to an imaginary entity through
positing a gesture of address which assumes a reply (Chase 88). Chase says,
according to de Man, the only face isthe face conferred by catachresis, the only
voice is the voice conferred by apostrophe 88. [Note: Chase asks how does the
giving of a face to a namebecome de-facement? He finds that the conclusion of
Autobiography as De-facement gives us an answer that perpetuates the question
rather than laying it to rest. It is offered in the form of allegory 87]
De Man does not dwell on apostrophe for apostrophe is just an addressing gesture
which actualizes prosopopoeia in text; he doesnt focus on personification either,
because personification is a rhetorical skill giving entity a face which naturalizes
human; also, he doesnt, undoubtedly, give as much emphasis on anthropomorphism
as on prosopopoeia, since anthropomorphism, through apostrophe and
personification, performs the totalizing act in text that harmonizes all the
particulars into one organic whole, as if the face given to the entity is the
ultimate and absolute truth projected [De Mans critique of anthropomorphism
107]. De Man singles out prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeia discloses the predicament
inherent in the fact that understanding takes place figuratively, that voice is a figure
which is, in other terms, the logical difficulty inherent in the deictic or demonstrative
function of language (Chase 89). Prosopopoeia, therefore, is the discovery of voice
being a figure, a discovery of the deictic function of language that itself involves a
conflict between the function of language as postulation or act and its function as
figure or representation (Chase 88). Here, we can see that Chase takes us further on
de Mans idea of prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeia, from de Mans perspective, is not
merely a face but also the act of giving a face or the act of figuring; it is, furthermore,
about the act of de-facing upon the act of giving a face when to give a face is also to
give it a name in the text, so it is exposing the linguistic predicament. That is why de
Man says: As soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopoeia as

positing voice or face by means of language, we understand thatwe are deprived

ofthe sense and shape of a world (RR 46) 88.
When de Man touches upon the linguistic predicament posed by prosopopoeia, he
discusses the positing function of language. He says that language does not only, as
conceived, represent entities, but also predicate entities 89. Representation assumes
the prior existence of an entity to be known (de Man) 89. Predication implies an
arbitrary act not determined by any existing relationships 90. Chase tries to
explain de Mans conception of predication with de Mans one of the essays on Hegel,
Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics 90. The subject and the predicate are
arbitrary linked with the positional power of language. The arbitrariness in the
positing of language is described by de Man as a necessity and impossibility 90.
If we have to mean something, we are necessarily to posit a relationship arbitrarily
between the subject and the predicate in language, but such a positing which
contributes to our meaning does not sufficiently and possibly substantiate the validity
of the relationship between the subject and the predicate. Chase illustrates how De
man uses Hegels account of the functioning of deictics such as this, here, or
now: The usage of these deictic terms is speaking of what is radically general even
as they mean to speak of what is absolutely particular, and such a phenomenon
implies, as Hegel says, the impossibility of saying the only thing on ever wants to
say, namely the certainty of sense perception 91. Hegel writes: Language as deixis
has the divine nature of immediately inverting [verkehren] the meaning and making
it into something else and thus not letting it get into words at all 91. He also writes:
I cannot say what Imean 91. There is an irreparable split between saying and
meaning, between language as postulation and language as representation. The
conception of language as to predicate entities points out how the positing of
voice as a figure covers over a muteness, an irreparable split in the function of
speech, the incompatibility between sagen (saying) and meinen (meaning) in
deixis 91. The elimination between saying and meaning intensifies the confrontation
when it comes to prosopopoeia. [It is similar to Michael Delvilles illustration of the
more distance between mind and body is eradicated, the more confrontation between
mind and body is stimulated in gastroaesthetics]
The confrontation between subject and predicate elicits an interesting situation
that within the subject (saying) there is the predicate (meaning) and within the
predicate (meaning) there is the subject (saying). They are, for the condition of their
existence per se, at the same time, have to be interdependent and independent of each
other 92. The positing of relationship, which is the positional power of language,
problematizes the position of the subject (saying) and the predicate (meaning). For
example, the generality of what a deictic term in fact says and the singularity of what
it is meant to mean, but a deictic term is able to say what it means or to mean what it
says only when the saying is understood as pointing to and not exactly pointing to the
meaning, or only when the meaning is understood as derived and not exactly derived
from the saying. The sign in language has to be so general and so singular to
mean. The relationship between saying and meaning is mutual obliteration 93, that
is the erasure of any relationship between what it is and what it says it is 92,
between the sign and the sign which is signifying 94. To give a face a name is to
make a description from inscription, a message from the nondescriptive,
nonpropositional, mechanical elements of rhyme and proper name 108, to give it an
intelligible pattern in language.

Chase continues with the linguistic predicament of prosopopoeia, which is giving

a face to a name, that is, giving a voice to the figure, making the figuring possible
through textualization, by illustrating the predicament of muteness. Chase
rephrases de Mans idea: To say what it means, the sign must take on a face, must
present a figure, but in being a face, it loses the power to mean, to speak. Language
functions as the representation of meaning only in blotting out the positing power that
enable it to act as language 94. He says, this is the predicament named in the
statement that voice is figure 94. The predicament is: first, there is a continuous
displacement undertaken by positing upon knowing, so one is never being able to
know (from to know to to posit); second, the continuous displacement undertaken
by positing upon knowing implies no authority to posit, that means the origin to posit
is already a kind of displacement, there is not a Word to posit but a figure that gives
face of figure, that is, language functions in figuring of figuring of figuringetc. 96
&102, so to posit is actually in the ever process of positing, Chase describes it as the
performance of language through a figure that confers or ascribes figure 99; third, (as
mentioned before), there is a continuous mutual obliteration between to posit and to
know, in other words, to posit is to know and not to know (the giving of face as defacement, the conferral of meaning as the erasure of the power to mean 99). There is
a suspension of reference, which is always in the contemporary conceptions of poetry
99.
Chase marks a turn. De Mans emphasis on the linguistic predicament actually
elicits the significance in the act of reading. Chase mentions de Mans idea: [o]nly
the possibility of the emergence of marks that are random, in no way determined until
their form and meaning is determined by an act of reading, makes possible the
existence of a text 97. The fictionality of the momentthe moment when the signs
exist regardless of any determination of their forms and meaningsenables the
existence of something called a text 98. De Man says that the act of reading is
imposing sense and meaning upon the senseless positional power of language 98,
so the act of reading is to give a voice or a face. The act of reading is the simultaneous
doing and undoing of the phenomenality of language (de Man): the doing and
undoing of the perceivability, the intellibility, of linguistic structuresthe conditions
of cognition 101. The act of reading on one hand is thrusting the process of
signification (the giving of face to a name) into the figural enigma which is similar
to a conscious cognition akin to the certainty of a sense perception 105. This
sense-certainty resonates with Susan Stewarts idea of the source of pleasure and
power of knowledge in attaining quasi-tactile density from the experience of
beholding. It seems that only can the act of reading effectuate the process of
signification through activating the phenomenality of sign and belying the materiality
of sign 105. It implies: the breaking down of the phenomenality of language into the
materiality of inscription and the figurality of figure, and hence the breaking down of
the possibility of experience as such, of having such a thing as an experience 107
Anthropomorphism is to give a name a face. Prosopopoeia is to give a face a name.
Both strategies have the same necessity of establishing the phenomenality of the
poetic voice, which is the principle of intelligibility of lyric and of language, yet both
meet with the same impossibility: they both exemplify the breaking down of the
phenomenality of the poetic voice into the materiality of language and the figurality
of figure. Anthropomorphism gives a face to and prosopopoeia takes the face off the

phenomenality of the poetic voice. No matter which way to go, they are also left with
a figure. The performance of reading carries out the failure of prosopopoeia by
making manifest the disfiguration of the figure inherent in the process of figuration
109. The act of reading, Chase says, makes us: not to deprive of a mouth to give a
voice and a face, but to reopen a mouth, to deprive of face and voice, and he
continues, [t]his is the deprivation of language, which takes place in the process of
understanding or reading, the gesture that gives a face to a name 112.
-De Mans Critique of Anthropomorphism, Lyric, and
Prosopopoeia107
-Follow-Up Readings:
---Fillamores Lecture on Deixis
---de Mans Allegories of Reading
---de Mans RR (?)
---de Mans Autobiography as De-facement
---de Mans Hypogram and Inscription
---de Mans Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics
---de Mans Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric (prosopopoeia is clearly
defined distinct from personification and anthropomorphism)
---de Mans essays on Hegel (Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics, Hegel on the
Sublime, and Hypogram and Inscription) examine the notion of predication
---Hegel on sense-certainty in his Phenomenology of Spirit [sense-certainty is the
poorest knowledge as it posits no distance between the perceiver and the perceived ;
immediate experience provides no more than a This ; Hegel concludes that
knowledge is not at all immediate but mediate ; Hegels critique of the rhetoric of
sense-certainty ; Here and Now]

Arac, Paul de Man and Deconstruction: Aesthetics, Rhetoric,

History [Copy]
-Synopsis:
Paul de Mans writing led the deconstructive criticism in around 1970s. De Mans
major work was Allegories of Reading in 1979. His posthumous collection, The
Rhetoric of Romanticism, was also influential. Arac states that de Mans work is
more an intervention within criticism than a direct response to works of literature
239. The key terms of de Mans literary criticism are reading and rhetoric 240. De
Man refuted the conception of distance as the fundamental necessity in attaining
truths of art in criticism. Stephen Donadio cited the view from Oscar Wilde: From
the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and
complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life (qtd. Donadio) 241. It is also, as
Donadio said, what Nietzsche and James sought in aesthetic criticism. De Man refuted
that view. De Man disrupted the binary oppositions of the proximate and the distant,
as well as that of the inside and the outside, to preempt the transfer of properties to a
synecdochic totalization) 251. The literary text thrusts the readers into a close contact
with the promises offered by the text, namely, with the referentiality of the text,
which, however, has given no promises at all and its referentiality is figural. It seems
that the readers who perform the act of reading are victimizing themselves. Arac says,
in literary text, its nonreferential, purely contemplative status produces a situation in

which it seems that the victims seduce themselves. This for de Man was what we do
in reading through the category of the aesthetic.Such is our humanity that even
when we have reduced the text to a machine, its power remains and seduces [us]
into dangerously close contact (qtd. de Man AR 298) 251.
Susan Stewarts conception of proximity and distance resonates here. It is the
pseudo-transparency between saying (signifier) and meaning (signified), in other
words, the illusive proximity between what one says and what one means, that makes
the saying and the meaning, the binary opposites as such, have a face-to-face
confrontation. The confrontation, in the trope of transparency thus immediacy in
representation, gives a dangerous temptation that deconstruction existed to combat
250. Readers, through reading, are imprisoned in an excess of cognition produced
by the text as they are never able to know the process of its own production once
language takes over in the production of meanings (qtd. de Man AR 300) 251. So
reading is an act for being seduced to know in vain (250, 251, 256). Reading
actualizes the seduction of the text (seduction and knowledge // to seduce and to
know). The reading as such, remarked by de Man, is an indictment of existence
rather than a panegyric of art (AR 93) 248. De Man perceives the reading as such is
always confronting a threat or a challenge 249. Proximity does not necessarily erase
the value of perceiving the perceived in aesthetic criticism. Rather, it can intensify the
relationship between opposites and shine upon the interdependent yet independent
complexity in the interrelationship. This is Michael Delvilles perspective of what
gastroaesthetics is doing.
De Mans theory of reading elicits the idea of deconstruction. Arac says: Because
rhetorical language complicates the simple regularities of logic or grammar, because
of the problematic relation between language in use and language as a tool of theory,
de Man warned repeatedly against expecting to find a smooth continuity between a
writers poetry and poetics (AR 25). Deconstruction itself depends on
discrepancies in this realm, for it does not work through a relation between
statements as in logic or dialectic. Rather it happens between metalinguistic
statements about the rhetorical nature of language and a rhetorical praxis that
puts these statements intoquestion (98). Deconstruction states the fallacy of
reference in a necessarily referential mode. This is the aporia, cognitive impasse,
predicament. De Man says, [t]here can be no escape from the dialectical movement
that produces the text (AR 187) 249.
De Mans conception of text comes from his dwelling on this aporia/cognitive
impasse/predicament in reading. He defines a text as any entity that can be
considered from [this] double perspective: as a generative, open-ended, nonreferential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental
signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence
(AR 270) [context-dependent and context-independent, general and singular,
universal and specific].
The moment of turn is all that makes the difference/conflicts manifest. The turn
is translated as trope (Greek: tropos). What is a turn? A turn, observes Arac, is
not just a means of expression; it is not necessarily at one with intention. The turn
changes intention, for trope is interpretation, not transparency 256, for instance,
converting an entity into its opposite, reversing one state to its opposite. Reading is

the turn, the trope, the figuring, giving a face to a name (Chase), making the
entity enter into new relationships which are enacting on differential turning 257. The
turn can make manifest the truth that the text per se refuses to mean. De Man says,
Texts engender texts and consist of a series of repetitive reversals that engenders
the semblance of a temporal sequence (AR 162) 258, which in Linguistics and
Poetics, Roman Jakobson states, Anything sequent is a simile 259. The turn
evinces that representation is not transparent 257.

Susan Stewarts Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

Ch. 4 Facing, Touch, and Vertigo

I. The Experience of Beholding [Facing]
Synopsis: Stewart intelligently starts with a reflection on the pleasure or obsession
that makes us want to touch a pattern. She gives examples, such as the pleasure of
trailing a stick along a fence, running a finger along a wall of rough bricks and
smooth pointing, drawing a splayed hand across a swath of corduroy 145. The
pleasure of touching a pattern incites the pleasure of invoking the presence of a
pattern. That kind of invoking involves a discerning of a form and it includes a tracing
of the form with a range of presuppositions and expectations, which condition our
experiences of form and account for our pleasure of tracing a form. The relationality
and the reciprocity between experiencing the form and the form itself start from the
moment of beholding. Stewart establishes the idea that the act of beholding posits the
temporal and spatial coordinates between the beholder and the beheld. In poetic
utterance, the act of beholding is the invocatory drive to address and describe the
beheld, which can be sensualized through human senses whatsoever. The address of
the beheld exemplifies how a poem summons a form and the beholders experience of
a form.
Stewart uses the example of Caedmons Hymn, the oldest extant poem in English
148. Caedmons Hymn is demonstrating the poet has the ability to recall the divine
poiesis through the hymns poiesis. What Caedmon, the poet, was singing, is: the
story of Gods own poiesis out of nothingness and darkness 148. Stewart makes an
observation of several things from Caedmons Hymn: 1. summoning is taking
place; 2. Caedmon does not just summon the divine poiesis but also summon himself,
something hidden or latent inside himself, which is inspiration, or, more cogently,
the demand that makes him to sing; 3. This demand on the poet to sing precedes the
composition and is not an artifact of composition 149; 4. This demand prepares or
creates a space and time for the singing, for performing the demand, for fulfilling the
requirements laid by the demand; 5. Caedmons singing performs the intersubjective
task of making significance, of pointing to meaning 149, that is, setting up the
relations, the possibilities for reciprocal communication, the conditions of delivery
and reception, and the dynamics of reciprocity. In conclusion, Stewart says,
Caedmons praise re-calls and re-creates the poiesis of the world. Stewart delineates

the idea of poiesis through eliciting the dynamics of time and space among the singer,
the sung, and the receiver. This is the way that Stewart illustrates on how poetry gives
frame to the surroundings; in other words, how poetry confers form upon chaos.
Stewart tries to think through the issues of framing and forming in poetry by using the
rhetorical term deixis. She says that deixis is useful in understanding the implicit and
reciprocal capacity for animation in the receiver 150: Emphasizing the bringing
forth of form over notions of imitation and representation per se, deixis yokes rhetoric
that is, an intention to move and a reciprocal receptivity to be movedto visual
and aural appearances 150. Deixis analyses how the epistemology of space and time
is conditioned by language. Deixis defines and creates the circumstances of specific
contexts as well as makes it possible to transcend the contexts. Through the
understanding of the specificity, that is the context-dependence, created in poetry with
the means of deixis, we know how a form is invoked and henceforth established. At
the same time, as the deictic terms can be carried over to the other contexts and make
themselves intelligible in the other contexts, they are the consciousness-carriers of
culture and history, and hence they can be understood without being bound to the
context. In this way, they are said to be context-independent 152. For example, deixis
helps us, without bound to any contexts, consider framing the time and space of
apprehension, the mutuality, reciprocity or nonreciprocity, or relations between
positions and perspectives, the reversibility of things amid the unidirectionality
of everyday time, and assumptions of intention and reception 156.
In poetic utterance, poetry plays the role of carrying over context dependence into
the figuration of context independencewith a transfer of sense impressions 152.
Here, Stewart elicits a proposition: poetry invokes a form through sense impressions
mediated in terms of the coordinates of time and space, which can be understood in
terms of deixis 152. Then, Stewart goes into the theory of deixis in linguistics and
explicates the way that deixis conditions time and space, for instance, deixis describes
orientation, movement, and perception: The study of deixis compels us to identify
the relations between objects and persons as relational and mutual, but not in
indeterminate ways. The articulation of proximity, of edges and interiors, and the use
of prepositions such as at, on, and in thrust us toward the presence or absence of
dimensionality, bounded or unbounded space, and surface 155. What is amazing of
the contribution of poetry to deixis is inventing new possibilities in time and space, as
works of art: works of art, in their articulation of alternative models of time and
space, and as they compel a suspension of the performative, pragmatic, and
instrumental functions of discourse and gesture, counter the rigidity of this time
system and enable reflection, recursiveness, and the utopian possibilities of repetition
and simultaneity 155.
Stewart now tries to make a transition from the experience of beholding to the
experience of touching, which is steered by the sense of touch. She quotes the ideas of
Martin Heideggers nearness and Jose Ortega y Gassetts visual proximity. Heidegger
says, [n]earness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing. In
Heideggers speculation, the more proximate the thing is visualized, the more the
nature of it is confirmed and grasped. Heidegger reckons that the thing as being the
thing not because of its nearness but of its nearing. The thing is the nearness. It is
impossible to tear the thing-ness of thing away from its nearness to us. It appears
that the thing has its nature occupying the proximity in relation to the beholder.

Ortega y Gassett argues, according to Stewart, proximate vision has a tactile quality
158, and this quasi-tactile density possessed by the ocular ray, and which permits it,
in effect, to embrace, to touch the earthen jar 158. Gassett attempts to say that visual
proximity incites the beholder to affirm the existence of the thing or the nature of the
thing by touching it. But Gassett, as Stewart puts it further, argues that there are
incommensurable positions when the act of beholding occupies in a position
where the thing beheld is between being proximate and distant. This situation happens
in the works of art, according to Gassett: Each art operates a magic lantern that
removes and transfigures its objects. On its screen they stand aloof, inmates of an
inaccessible world, in an absolute distance. When this derealisation is lacking, an
awkward perplexity arises: we do not know whether to live the things or observe
them 158. This awkward perplexity of Gassett, according to Stewart, is Heinrich
Wolfflins source of power and pleasure in apprehension 158.
In appreciating a work of art, in grasping the truth, in understanding the thing-ness of
thing in the most cogent and empathetic way, if that is possible or potentially possible,
the question arises: how close is too close? How far is too far? What is the right
distance? How can we know the distance is right? In what way can we posit ourselves
at a right position which is not too close and not too far? Stewart does not have a
straightforward answer. Instead, she puts forward the complexity in this already
complex perplexity of proximity and distance in perceiving the thing-ness of thing.
She uses Dickinsons 1869 poem beginning Split the Larkand youll find the
Music as well as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggios painting Doubting
Thomas of 1602 or 1603 as the examples to address the questions. She says, in
Dickinsons poem, to grasp the bird as the real thing making music raises the
possibility of killing the whole bird: to dissect the bird to see where the music comes
from. This touch is the danger of touch that goes over into destruction and of sight
without empathy 159. The music from the birdthis work of artcannot be
appreciated, grasped, or understood with this destructive touch, which obviously is
too intrusive (too close) to the art, truth, or thingness that the transcendence is
destroyed. The art, truth, or thingness, embodied in a form of life, such as a bird, a
kind of immanence, with which transcendence disappears if it per se, the life itself,
is destroyed. What Stewart is saying is that if one has to grasp the art, truth, or
thingness, first, one cannot depend on its material source 159, and second, one cannot
materialize the touch as a way to grasp for avoiding an over-intrusive proximity,
which is not getting close to understand but destroying without empathy and wisdom.
Following Dickinsons poem, Stewart talks about the painting, Doubting Thomas,
by Caravaggio, to further illustrate the complexity in grasping art, truth, and
thingness. The hesitation between coming too close and staying too far is exemplified
in the complex irony of faith in the painting. The prehensile hand of Thomas touching
the body of Christ shows that [t]here is something of this in the complex confusion
of subject and object that ensues from the simple exercise of touching one of our
hands with the other 160. On the level of the story of Doubting Thomas, Thomas
does not believe the resurrection of Christ because he never sees the mark of nails on
his hands; but he starts to believe when Christ shows his immaterial appearance and
lets him touch his wounds which are material and immaterial. In this story, the
confusion comes in whether Thomas touches or does not touch, as the wounds being
touched are lingering between the material and the immaterial. On the level of the
painting, Stewart says that there is much confusion in the proximate and distant for it

provides a subtle gloss on the transivity and intransivity of touch 160: 1. we dont
know whether Thomas is painted as blind or not; 2. we are not sure of the agency in
the depiction of hands, that is, if Christs directing Thomas finger or Thomas finger
initiating the touch; 3. we dont know how we should read the tear in Thomas cloak
in relation to the scar in the flesh of Christ. So, not to mention the faith of Thomas in
grasping Christs resurrection, but just with such a painting in front of our eyes, we
become very indecisive and confused, and so a solid and confident grasp, which is
conceptualized as faith, is problematized.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset, On Point of View in the Arts

[Copy]
-Synopsis: Jose Ortega Y Gasset differentiates two modes of seeing: the proximate
vision and the distant vision. He uses the modes of seeing as illustration of different
points of view in the art of painting. The points of view are embodied in the painters
way of seeing things and their beliefs in the mind/body relationship. The role of eye
plays the function of either absorbing or projecting the objects seen in the exhibition
of the shifts in viewpoints as exemplified in different periods of time in art history.
Also, he talks about what things are: things are solids / objects solid enough to offer
resistance to their hands 111
Gasset gives several examples: The Primitive (actual volume of each thing,
immediate and tangible corporeality, multiple points of view, every object asserts its
volume, independence, and particularism), The Renaissance (organizes things to an
external force, which is the geometrical idea of unity, and hence achieves a unity as a
single point of view), The Venetians (the bodies seem to wish to lose their hard
contours, there is a struggle between proximate vision and distant vision, but the will
to abandon the proximate point of view is still lacking), The Charoscuros (asserts a
principle of unity to deliver a single point of view, but the principle is not the
geometrical idea of unity but the unity of illumination, i.e. the painter sees his entire
work immersed in the ample element of light, the object in itself begins to be
disregarded and have to no other role than to serve as support and background for the
light playing upon it, the trajectory of light is the thing itself, the painters gaze fixes
upon the surface rather than the object), Velasquez (retracts the point of view and
places it not around the object but around the chromatic gases, formless pennons, pure
reflections between his eyes and the object, reducing the object to molecules of light
and pure sparks of color), Impressionism (it eliminates all tactile and corporeal
resonance; Instead of painting objects as they are seen, one paints the experience of
seeing; Instead of an object as a thing, it is a mass of sensations; Seeing/Painting is
the activity of the subject, it is the subjective states through which and by means of
which things appear; so the point of view penetrates into the vision itself, into the
subject himself, not proximate nor distant vision anymore but an oblique vision),
Cubism (psychic depths give subjective states subjective realities that contain virtual
objects, the sensations are ideated, the Cubist painter substitutes for the bodies of
things non-existent volumes of his own invention, to which real bodies have only a
metaphorical relationship; the point of view doesnt originate from seeing but
inventing, the subject imagines the painter)

In Gasettes analysis, proximate vision has the following qualities: quasi-tactile

quality 111, optical hierarchy, corporeality/bulk/volume/body of an object, focus on a
point, what we see at the proximate is convexity 112, proximate vision is exclusive,
since it apprehends each object in itself and separates it from the rest 115, architecture
and unity 115, proximate vision dissociates, analyzes, distinguishesit is feudal 122,
proximate: multiple points of view ; Distance vision: it makes the object become pure
vision 111, formless and confused, no solidity but pure vision, cease to be filled
volumes and become mere chromatic entities, without resistance, mass or convexity
111, become illusory 111. we do not fix the gaze on any point, but rather attempt to
embrace the whole field, including its boundaries 112, what we see at distance is a
hollow space/empty concavity 112, distant vision synthesizes, combines, throws
togetherit is democratic 122, distant: single and unified point of view.

EPIDEICTIC
Ancient conceptions of lyric would be a form of epideictic discourse (the rhetoric of
praise of blame, focused on what is to be valued) ; modern proposals to consider lyric
would be seeing them as writing thoughts for readers to articulate (Theory of Lyric,
Introduction pdf 3) ; Pindar and Horace ; lyric forms can revive, that makes the
evolution and transformation of lyric possible (Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 4) ;

(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 7)

On epideictic discourse in Aristotles Rhetoric:

(Theory of Lyric, Notes pdf 3)

Values/Epideictic:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 27)

-Pedagogy of lyric, interpretation of lyric in modern sense, interpretation of lyric in
prior centuries (lyric is just to teach and to delight):

(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 5)

decreased interest in lyric when poems exist to be interpreted
(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 5)
Culler wants to investigate how lyric is not subordinate to interpretation.
Interpretation is not the ultimate approach of understanding lyric. He sees poetics
overtaking hermeneutics (not to find meaning)

(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 5) --- Poetics and Hermeneutics (Theory of Lyric,
Introduction pdf 5-6)

(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 6)

-Lyric is tension between tradition and non-tradition, between ritualistic and fictional,
between real and unreal, between objective and subjective, between ordinary and
more than ordinary

(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 7)

Lyric address and lyric present:

(Theory of Lyric, Introduction pdf 8)

-Chapter 1: Two poems of Sappho and Horace respectively indicate the intricacy of
apostrophic gesture (Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 10)
Sappho, the lyric poet par excellence, Ode to Aphrodite, Sappho is a Greek poet
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 1)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 3)

---Dialogism ; relate the character of lyric to event, lyrics eventness
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 5):

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 5)

---Sapphos lyric as song ; not only to repeat it but to repeat it at will:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 5)

---performitivity of language ; a remarkably poetic speech act
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 6) ; lyric as performance and event
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 6)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 6)

[similar to Stewarts idea of darkness]

(Theory of Lyric, Notes pdf 2)

[triangulated address]
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 6)
---Features of Sapphos poem / triangulated address:
i. the self-reflexive putting-into-play of the status of the other
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 7)
ii. not a fictional representation of an event, but makes the lyric itself as an event
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 7)
iii. foreground the ritual character of the poem as a chant/spell through repetitive
metrical patterns
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 7)
iv. it allows itself to imagine a response to its call or address and works to constitute
and active relationship
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 7)
v. its deictic apparatus of the here-and-now enunciation presents itself as an event in a
time that repeats, and that creates the effects of presence, links value to that mortality
time, rather than transcendence of mortality
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 7)
---Sapphos apostrophic gesture is prosopopoeia

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 10)

-Ch. 1: Horace, a Roman poet, one of his famous odes warns of the dangers of love
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 8)
---Horaces poem is not just a fictional representation of a speech act, as there is no
indicated certainty of the kind of speech event he is representing, including the
rationale, places, time, circumstances, so it should be taken as an act of poetic
address, that means, writing which images the addressee as it imagines the gracile
youth:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 8)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 9)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 10)
[Sapphos lyric is an event itself/a speech act itself ; Horaces lyric is a fictional
representation of a speech event/a speech act]
-Ch.1: Petrarch, Italian poet, Canzonierie, complexity of address and invocation
---has an acute sense of time:

(Theory of Lyric, Notes pdf 3)

---Lyric is figured to relate to the inner and outer worlds ; individual and universal

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 11-12)

---self-reflexivity is not a condition so much as a process
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 12)
---a moral apothegm more than a fictive representation of subjectivity:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 13)

----usually read as a fictional representation of a speech act by a persona, not the poet:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 13)

-Ch.1: Goethe, German poet, poem Heidenroslein (Heath Rose)
---refrain ; attaches the story to the present time of lyric discourse in which the rose is
repeatedly invoked ; the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection onto the axis of combination ; disrupts narrative and brings back to the
present of discourse
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 15)
---the poem positions the reader as the speaker
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 15)
-Ch.1: Leopardis Linfinito ; nature
---provokes the sublime/the transcendence rather than the present
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 16)
---the sublime moment/feeling is portrayed as being able to repeated in the lyric
present:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 17)

---Numerous deictics render the feelings of being proximate and distant
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 17)
---Celebrating imaginative self-reflexivity more than a particular sublime view:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 17)

-Ch.1: Baudelaires A une passante (To a Woman Passing By)
---lyric as the articulation of structures of feeling, the social imaginary

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 18)

---from love as first sight (as in Dante and Petrarch) to love at last sight ; transfiguring
initial sight of the beloved
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 18)
---urban experience exceeds the traditional lyric structure:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 19)

---from representation of a singular event to transformation of the event into
celebration of lost possibility:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 19)

-Ch.1: Lorcas La luna asoma (The Moon Comes Out)
---Parodying epideictic function:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 21)

-Ch.1: Williams Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow
---makes use of spatial arrangements to produce lyric effects
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 21)
---directs attention to the relation between the visual form and the sound sequence:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 22)

---lifts lyric from the zone of things said and the oral discourse of saying things ; the
poem gives us not a voice buy voicing:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 22)

---it appears epideictic, giving value, performing the function of praise, but it doesnt
give the epideictic function a complete fulfilment, it stops to soon ; we puzzle over it
but we remember it

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 23)

-Ch.1: John Ashberys This Room
---The You foregrounds the problem of singularization and iterability

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 23)

---putting forward the questions of language and agency

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 24)

-Ch.1: Four parameters of generic tradition of lyric
---Eva Muller-Zettelmann

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 24)

---Culler generalizes the parameters of determining a text as lyric around four main
topics:
1. The question of the enunciative apparatus of lyric
e.g. addressed to listeners and readers, not explicitly addressed, musing overheard,
how to think about and describe lyrics that avoid the fiction of speaker and explicit
address, treating reader as the speaker (Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 25)
Voice and Voicing:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 26)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 26)

2. lyrics attempt to be itself an event rather than the representation of an event
e.g. lyrics considered by Aristotle as nonmimetic (considered as a speech event
rather than a representation of action), presenting truths about the world in
presentation of assertions or judgments/conferring values/performing epideictic
function (AZs thought on lyric as public/giving values)
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 26)
Values/Epideictic:

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 27)

Lyric being performativity of event and being the event itself

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 27)

Lyric gives the impression of something happening now ; creates effects of presence

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

3. Lyric has a ritualistic dimension, i.e. memorable writing to be received,
reactivated and repeated by readers, like a text as composed for reperformance
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

the reader is also the performer of the lines

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

4. Lyric has an explicitly hyperbolic quality ; lyric always has an optative
character, seeking transformation of experience ; investing mundane objects or
occurrence with meaning is a hyperbolic risk
(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

transcendence and spiritual

(Theory of Lyric, Ch.1 pdf 28)

*****
Between Biblical Criticism and Poetic Rewriting Samuel Tongue
-Poetry foregrounds the performance of meaning making (124)

(124)

(129)
-Renaissance apologist of poetry, Philip Sidney: poetry is to teach and to delight ;
historian just draws attention to particular truth of things rather than the general
reason of things 130
-Poetry has the function of teaching and delighting, both heuristic and aesthetic, the
tradition of Sidney. Sidney is drawing up the classical ideas of poetry of Longinus,
Quintilian, and Horace

131 //
Robert Lowth also sees poetry having advantage and pleasure

131
-Poetry: self-referential, sign and meaning, the inexpressible

134

135
-Poetry is always social, Adornos On Lyric Poetry and Society

Critics on Lyric

Abrams: non-narrative, thought and feelings

Northrop Frye: poems to be sung, stems from the loss of the beloved, following Mill,
poetry is overheard
John Stuart Mill:
poetry is overheard
Helen Vendler:
poetry is not overheard, poetry posits reader as the speaker
Osip Mandelstam:
the reader is always the intended recipient ; poetry addresses the reader
John Ashbery:
poetry foregrounds the complexity in language and agency
Susan Stewart:
reading of lyric must entail an interplay of identifications, "a being spoken through as
well as speaking" ; enables and inhabits the lyric's play of temporality and sentiency
Barbara Johnson
William Waters
Nick Halpern:
Nick Halpern uses Glck's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems
are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a
process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted
Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson: turning away from the poem's
readers to a distinctive lyric self
William Waters: lyric's speaker and hypothetical reader are more or less explicitly in
dialogue
Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern: Their underlying premise is that
it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken
each has its uses
Ode

5th C BC: Pindar

1st C BC: Horace
Early 19th C Romanticism: English/Keatsian ode ; Wordsworths ode to immortality,
Keats odes to a nightingale, a Grecian urn, and autumn ; Shelleys odes to the west
wind and a skylark
20th C: Francis Ponges The Voice of Things ; Pablo Nerudas Elemental Odes ;
Barbara Hambys odes to public bathrooms, the English language, hardware stores ;
Yusef Komunyakaas Ode to the Maggot

terms (on lyric research): issues, parameters, theoretical discourse, theoretical

account, theoretical framework, critical discourse, lyric interpretation in modern
sense, modification and expansion, a relation to tradition, dogmatic claims, lyric
tradition, Western lyric tradition, fictional dimension/ritualistic dimension of lyric,
lyric composition, classical and modern lyrics, identifies/takes up, lyric
discourse/efficacy of lyric discourse/lyric practices, canonical lyrics of the Western
tradition, poetic phenomenon, a theory of lyric/a general model of lyric, engagement
with lyric poetry, complexity of address and invocation, the poetic speaker, the
production of poetic discourse, subjectivity/subjective experience/intense expression
of the subjects inner experience, lyric tradition, the idea of lyric, enunciative
apparatus of lyric, the notion of lyric, lyrics attempt, a space of narrative, ritualistic

space of lyric discourse, lyric bent, historical relevance

Qualia
Qualia [plural] / Quale [singular] (subjectivity, more than an apple only, simply
apple, simply food)
-Qualia, according Peter Consenstein, who draws reference to Clarence Irving Lewis
contemporary usage of the term in her Mind and the World Order in 1929, represents
simple elementary states of sensory data that are so numerous, virtually infinite, that
most are not noticed (introspected) (Consenstein pdf 6). It is similar to T.S. Eliots
objective correlative: the way of expressing a particular emotion through a
particular combination of a set of objects, situation, a chain of events, the objective
correlative expresses a kind of artistic inevitability, it is a complete adequacy of the
external to the emotion. Qualia are seen as a fundamental in constituting human
consciousness and unconsciousness through the interiority of experience that defines
the identity of a human individual. Qualia are sense data, are a combination of sense
data of human experiences, are core composite of human consciousness and
unconsciousness, referring to the specific nature of subjective experience in the world.
-Qualia also bring forth the discussion of intent and intentionality. To be aware of
qualia is to surface the unconsciousness and awaken the awareness of the intent.
-There are different questions with regard to the idea of qualia:
---How brain builds consciousness?
---How does an individual transfer sense data to brain to build the consciousness?
---To define and to interpret qualia is problematizing the ideas of subjectivity,
consciousness, intent and intentionality, rather than circumscribing each idea with a
clear-cut boundary and threshold, and there ensues the complexity with regard to the
specific nature and our understanding of subjectivity, consciousness, intent and
intentionality
Sense and Sensibility, Lodge (Guardian)
-Literature is a record of human consciousness ; Lyric poetry is arguably man's
most successful effort to describe qualia ; The novel is arguably man's most
successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving
through space and time.
-Human consciousness, as the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, author of The Feeling
of What Happens , makes clear, is self-consciousness. We not only have experiences,
we are conscious of ourselves having them, and of being affected by them.
-Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained , says something very similar. As
spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories. ; "Our fundamental
tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or
building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling
the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are."
-Consciousness is an elusive concept
-Joseph Levine, 1983, Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap has indicated
that qualia/quale is a key term in conscious studies, meaning the specific nature of our
subjective experience of the world
-See definition of qualia in The Oxford Companion of the Mind
-Reading literature is important because it gives us a convincing sense of what the

consciousness of people other than ourselves is like pdf 4

Michelle Grangauds Qualia Poems, Consenstein
-When we discuss qualia, we tap into the big areas of subjectivity and consciousness.
By considering qualia, we can explore how poets raise the consciousness of the
quotidian. Qualia are the sense data collected and posited from a series of unconscious
experiences. Qualia represent simple elementary states of sensory data that are so
numerous, virtually infinite, that most are not noticed (introspected) (Consenstein
pdf 6). Subjectivity is not just about consciousness but also unconsciousness or
subconsiouness. An idea from Freud. Leopold Stubenberg defines a quale by saying
that having a quale is not a matter of knowing or believing or perceiving or
representing any thing in any way. In short to have a quale is not to cognize it (qtd. in
Consenstein pdf 9). There are different concerns of seeing subjectivity and
consciousness between a scientific approach and a literary perspective.
-qualia and poetry: how brain may build consciousness (philosophers, neuroscientists,
psychiatrists)
-consciousness is largely but on events of which the individual is unconscious

pdf 6
-The science of consciousness: qualia --- a collection of personal or subjective
experiences, feelings, and sensations that accompany awareness

pdf 7
-Qualia is about the unconsciousness

pdf 9
-Qualia brings the question of: subjectivity, consciousness, intention

pdf 9
-Intent is how the mind reveals unconscious states
-Differences between intent and intentionality pdf 11 ; Zen-like posture:
nonintentionality pdf 12

pdf 11

pdf 11

*Apostrophe
Readings:
-Quintilian, The Institutes of Oratory
-John Stuart Mill [eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard]
-Northrop Frype [the poet, so as to speak, turns his back on his listeners]
-Jonathan Culler, Apostrophe, in The Pursuit of Signs
-Jonathan Culler, Lyric Address, in Theory of the Lyric
-Jonathan Culler, Deconstruction and Lyric
-Jonathan Culler, Reading the Lyric
-Ann Keniston, Overheard Voices
-Natalie Polland, Speaking to You
-Barbara Johnson, Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion
-Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking [G-Book]
-William Waters, Poetrys Touch: On Lyric Address
-W.R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric
-Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners
-Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry [a lyric is meant to be spoken by its reader as if
the reader were the one uttering the words. A lyric poem is a script for performance by
its reader [.] It constructs a twinship between writer and reader xlii-xliii]
-Charles Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire: Collected Essays [Baudelaire on Theodore
de Banville, hyperbole and apostrophe]
-McGuirk, Apostrophe in Seamus Heaney
-Mara Scanlon and Chad Engbers, Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over [Requested]

-Hosek and Parker, Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism [UQ Book]
-Smith, Apostrophe, or Lyric Art of Turning Away
-Usher, Apostrophe in Greek Oratory
-Kneale, Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered

Points to Consider
-Apostrophe:
---All address is motivated by the desire to unmake distance (Keniston 51)
---Apostrophe in Romantic Lyrics: exalted, transcendence, ethereal (Keniston 2) ;
Apostrophe is a hopeful gesture, which defies both the fact of absence (the fact that,
being out of earshot, the mother cannot be made to hear) and the laws of chronology
or narrative (the fact that, having departed, she cannot be made not to have departed)
(Keniston 58)
---Apostrophe in postmodern lyrics: allying with a particular historic moment, class,
locale, and mindset ; more mundane, solid, everyday, quotidian, myth-shattered, like
subterranean, urban, dingy particularity ; absence and paradoxes of apostrophes
conventions (Keniston 2) ; Language, as Barbara Johnson has argued in relation to
apostrophe, originates in a bodily (more exactly a maternal) absence it cannot unmake
or express, it must fail, in Kristevas terms, to signify. In a sense, apostrophe is
speech that has been severed from speechs conventional signifying or communicative
function (Keniston 58). Rather than truly speaking to anyone else, it alludes to what
has been removed and thus to its own processes of displacement and projection.
In this way it always hints at what has been taken, as the signifiers fort and da
allude to the maternal body without speaking of them directly and thus mark the
childs alienation from bodily presence. It is alienated and incommensurable, in
Kristevas terms, freed from the compulsion to represent (Keniston 58)
---Apostrophes etymological association with turning away suggests that apostrophe
and rhetorical figure more generally permit a turning away from or avoidance of what
is distasteful or painful (Keniston 44)
---These poems make stark an exclusion and also a pathos inherent in all lyric. They
offer, that is, a particularly vivid example of dyamics concealed but present in other
poems. (Keniston 27)
---Focusing on Plaths address changes her poems. Attention to this apostropphe
renders these poems less solitry than they often seem, and also more crafted and more
allusive. (Keniston 27)
---The speaker begins by blurring the boundaries between herself and the horse. This
is an impulse toward animation. This impulse takes a very different form by poems
end. The speakers concern is no oonger with the horses body, which drops out of the
poem as does the pronoun we. Instead she describes her transformation into what
she sees around her. She then defines herself through analogies with a series of
inaimate objects removed from the landscape she is moving through. Plaths
speakers transformation into an object involves an acquisition of power: the poems
final images invest her with a force and autonomy she lacked earlier (Keniston 39).
---Barbara Johnson connects the uncertainty of apostrophe about the others status
to an uncertainty about the precise degree of human animation that existed in the
entity killed (Keniston 41) // To associate apostrophe or invocation with what is
inarticulate, artifical, and uncertain is to allude to loss. Julia Kristeva in a discussion
of melancholia suggests: the depressed person has the impression of having been
deprived of an unnameable, supreme good, of something unrepresentable, that
perhaps only an invocation might point out, but no word could signify (Keniston

53) // Invocation: Kristeva, Ramazani, Culler (Keniston 53)

---(Paul de Mans notion of prsopopeia as giving and taking away of faces) The poem
attempts to elide between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. By
jumping rapidly between different modes of prosopopeia and metaphor, the speaker
affirms the inadequacy of her own analogies (Keniston 45).
---Meandering of desires and fears (loss, belonging) (Keniston 51) ; considers the
functions, capacilities and limitation of apostrophe (Keniston 51)
---Standing outside but alluding to lyric Merill exposes the artificiality of apostrophe,
enumerates the ways langauge fails both to evoke others and to describe the desire
itself, reveals something about what is essential to lyric, an affinity and even a
nostalgia for lyric (Keniston 54)
---James Merrill: Apostrophe, like translation, sets forth a realm distinct from the
actual or nonverbal experience of loss. The poems linguistic constructions can create
a reality distinct from the actual realm of longing. Apostrophe permits the
modulation of being lost into being found or at least their juxtaposition, as the
repeated or implies ; Language replaces or translates what is gone not into some
verstion of that lost entity but into its own grammar (Keniston 68)

Jakobson, Shifters and Verbal Categories

-speech pragmatics, code, Cavell: appealing to criteria and attunement, code and
message (code to code, message to message, code to message, message to code) 1
-Shifters --- indexical symbols --- existential relation related to the object --- indexical
symbols, in particular peronsal pronouns, are elementary but the most complex
category where code and message overlap 2

Culler, Apostrophe, The Pursuit of Signs

-Apostrophe is troping not on the meaning of word but on the circuit or situation of
communication itself --- occasion, character of the event/different characters of the
poetic act (celebration in Horace, the act of transmitting a poetic message in Waller,
and prophetic in Blake) (Culler Lyric Address 223), the performativity of the
speaker, the continuing lyric present, marked as voicing, iterative and iterable
performance --- Vendlers tonalities in communication --- Smiths attunement --Stanley Cavells philosophical conception on attunement: to help to articulate what
gives it the rationality it has, his idea of mutual attunement in search of criteria The
(Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson
Naoko SaitoStanley Cavell 93), Cavells discussion of Wittgenstein, criteria
and human knowledge, intimacy is a different kind of presence
-Definition, Delimitation, Invocation, Manifestation 2
-Invocational calling: Optative, imperative, carrying the poet towards it 4 (Geoffery
Hartman on Blake)
-To apostrophize is to make the world sentient 3 ; from I-You relation to I-Thou

relation 4 (Harold Bloom) --- Harold Bloom: The Ultimate Thou 5 (Cavell: Appealing
to Criteria) but Culler says we should avoid that
-Invocation: 1st: I-Thou, present the object as subject, The vocative of apostrophe is
an approach to the event because its animate presuppositions are deeply embedded 5
--- a force 5, an uncalculable force of an event 15 --- the vocative posits a relationship
between two subjects 5 --- 2nd: constitute peoples encounters with the world as
relations between subjects 5 --- 3rd: Apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses
to establish with an object a relationship which helps to constitute him, ; Invocation
is a figure of vocation 6 --- poet makes himself as a poetic presence through the
image of voice, nothing figures voice better than the pure O of the voicing , which is
the soul 6 (Whitman: poets convince by their presence ; voice, poetic act, poetic
voice) --- presence, soul, embodiment of poetic tradition and the spirit of poesy 6,
brings out the condition in which the poet can be in dialogue with the universe 6 --4th: To read the apostrophe as a sign of fiction which knows its own fictive feature,
apostrophe is a way of constituing a poetic persona by taking up a special relation to
objects (Paul de Man: activity, the one minds modifications, internalization) 9 --presence and absence, I and you, inside and outside, past and present, a complex play
of mystification and demystification 16 --- Apostrophe is not the representation of the
event but the event itself 15
-Apostrophe must be repressed because this high calling of poetry must not be seen to
depend on a trope, an O 15
-Apostrophe AND Muse?

Ann Keniston, Overheard Voices

Terms:
lyric subject, lyric self, selfhood, subjectivity, postmodern apostrophe, postwar
apostrophe, apostrophes conventions, apostrophes reappearance, postmodern
American poetry, the structure of apostrophe, the situation of apostrophe, the
apostrophized other, the apostrophizer
Comments on critics focus on apostrophe in terms of the periods of
the lyrics
-Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man, John Hollander, W.R. Johnson 136
-Michael Macovski, Paul Friedrich, Zofia Burr: Apostrophe makes lyric dialogic 137
-John Stuart Mill: We are inevitably excluded by, turned away from in, and forced to
overhear poetry, rather than being addressed or invited in 28
Introduction
-Synopsis: Keniston introduces the structure of apostrophe of the postwar or
postmodern lyric which is very different from the apostrophe conventions. She links
the apostrophe in postmodern lyrics to the paradoxes of desire. The apostrophe in the
postmodern lyrics insist on the significance of the apostrophe even though it fails to
get proximate to the presence which is desired for by the traditional apostrophe. It
foregrounds such a failure. It emphasizes on the absence. But the absence does not
undermine the desire but intensify the revelation of the desire being illusory. The
exclusion, the distance, the absence, that is, the unmaking of the selfhood, the

revealing of the instability of subjectivity, are the only way to recover the intimacy
with the self. If lyric subjectivity is defined by the circuit of communication or the
character of the event that the apostrophe establishes, as Culler says, the circuit of
communication and the character of the event established by the apostrophe in the
postmodern lyric is the paradoxes of desire, which are embodied in the intersubjective
overhearing and the intertextual overhearing. These two redresses of Mills notion of
overhearing characterize Kenistons introduction of the postmodern lyrics
apostrophe.
-Apostrophe of romantic lyrics:
---exalted and ethereal, timeless and transcendent, soaring and ambiguous sense of
transcendence 1 --- affirms proximity 2 --- apostrophe is built on a desire for the
others presence and tends to conceal the impossibility of its desire 8
-Apostrophe of postwar lyrics/postmodern lyrics: allying with a particular historic
moment, class, locale, and mindset ; more mundane, solid, everyday, quotidian, mythshattered, like subterranean, urban, dingy particularity ; the addressee is showing the
limitations of the act of address, so the addressee is defined only by contrasts with
what it is not 1-2 --- affirms separation and absence 2 --- uses apostrophe to
undermine apostrophes conventions, as Culler claims that apostrophe associates the
lyric with all that is most radical, embarrassing, pretentious and mystificatory in the
lyric 2 [the supremacy in Nerudas food?] --- postwar address affirms a historically
particular notion of what apostrophe can and cannot do (intersubjective and
intertextual overhearings) 4 --- Postwar apostrophe is concerned with the
paradoxes of otherness, with the often irreconcilable conflict between the desire
for others to be made present and the essential solitude of the lyric speaker.
Address in this way allows postwar poems to enact and explore questions of
desire 4 ---Postmodern address intensifies the (desire unfulfilled) paradoxes,
downplaying the optimism of traditional apostrophethe faith that the other is
there and can hearby foregrounding the absence of the addressee. This
insistence on absence does not undermine the desire articulated by these poems
rather, the desire is intensified by being revealed to be illusory 8
-Desire and apostrophe // Presence and absence // Self and Other:
---postwar poems often regard the lyric with a desire expressed through and
corresponding to their desire for their addressees embodiment 4 ; The very structure
of apostrophe alludes to the paradoxes of desire 10
---draw attentions to the limitations of confessional assumptions about stability of
subjectivity, and they also reveal the limitations of a postmodern poetics that attempts
to do away altogether with subjectivity ; it is apostrophe, a figure explicitly identified
with lyric, that these poets use to explore and interrogate poetic selfhood 5 ; in
postwar poems, subjectivity is the central but contested preoccupation of the lyric 6
---The emphasis is on the You rather than the lyric I 6 ; postwar lyric often
defines itself in terms of an always evasive other, it emphasizes the necessity of
interrogating selfhood as a fixed or unified category ; it allows the lyric to focus on
the exact relation between lyric and selfhood 6 ; The lyric self exists by means of
and in the service of the poem itself, but also chafes against the generic structure
to which it is captive 6 ; Kenistons emphasis is on the ways that apostrophe allows
postmodern poets to comment on lyric while articulating desires that, enabled by the
capacities and limitations of the genre, transcend lyric 7

---You & the paradoxes of desire: replaces what is known with what is desired, it
requires a leap of faith 8, the speaker and the reader radically suspend disbelief ;
Lacan and Johnson: displacement and elaboration of the desire 8 ; The you of
apostrophe is not merely an externalized or split-off figure for the speaker or
what Culler calls an act of radical interiorization and solipsism, address
provides a way for the speaker of lyric to consider the extent to which others
constitute the self 9 ; Apostrophic poems construct a position from which their
speaker can desire lyric itself 10, so laying out the equivalence between the desire
within the poem (for the other to appear) and the desire enacted by the poem (for
lyric) 10, requires a reader absent from the scenes both of composition and utterance
11 ; Johnsons notion that the cry of Mama! underlying all apostrophe marks not
proximity but the speakers knowledge that proximity cannot be attained 15, Barbara
Johnsons notion of apostrophe emphasizes the failure of direct communication 16 ;
Postmodern address keeps looking back at lyric, hearing it not so much as an
inescapable and therefore oppressive rhythm but as a marker of the desire for
proximity. As a result, postmodern poems affirm neither Fryes disinterestness nor
Tuckers defiant weariness. Rather, these poems affirm the pathos of overhearing:
straining to hear the responses of their apostrophized others, their speakers also
overhear the apostrophes that preceded theirs, which they comprehend and toward
which they yearn but which they can no longer easily inhabit. This pathos itself
contains contradictionsthe term refers both to the unmediated identification of
spectator with what a work of art conveys and to the maudlin or ironic excesses of
that identificationand as such connects the intersubjective with the intertextual.
Overhearing is pathetic in that it seems to unmake the selfs solitude even as it
affirms that solitude. Positing the possibility of identification and union, it insists
on exclusion 12-13 ; Brock-Broido and Lowell insist on the existence of an other,
even if that other cannot be placed or identified ; it requires the speaker to
acknowledge the limitations of speech. But it also affirms the persistence of faith in
an other, even if the other remains a negative presence 21-22
-Turning away from Judge: Quintilian, L.M. Findlay
-Ambivalence, Impreciseness, Instability: Apostrophe sets both the speaker and the
poet into a position of overhearing that affirms the instability of apostrophic utterance
itself 16 (the apostrophized other is fluctuating between listener and poet, the
apostrophe is caught between recollection and defiance 16) --- the presence of an
overhearer reveals the limitations of direct speech 17 --- Brock-Broidos Her Habit
emphasizes the instability of address and hearing is more dramatically affirmed by its
representation of the overhearing of earlier lyric 19
-Tuckers notion of intersubjective overhearing: the scenes of overhearing that
occur within the parameters of the fictional world established by the poem while
diminishing the power and integrity of the speaker, whom Tucker sees as central to
this mode of overhearing 17 ;
-Tuckers notion of intertextual overhearing: the dependence of poetic speech on
the overhearing of various kinds of voices17 ; Tucker puts it in Victorian monologue
and he claims that the Victorian monologue longed for the lyric mode its practitioners
so incessantly, excessively overheard 20 ; the lyric represents a generic longing 20 ;
Brock-Broidos Her Habit evokes, desires, remakes poetry 21

-Intersubjective and intertextual overhearing: The poems Keniston look at

represent the pathos thematized in terms of overhearing: the intersubjective dynamics
dramatized by the situation of apostrophe become, in different ways, opportunities to
examine the intertexual problem of relying on a figure linked with a lyric tradition
that seems obsolete 22. The pathos inheres in the problems of affect, intensity,
awkwardness, and embarrassment of being in the position of yearning for something
unobtainable 22. It demonstrates the ways that postmodern poets critique and extend
lyric 22. It leads to redefine lyric subjectivity, and delineate, challenge, and extend the
parameters of lyric itself 22
Ch. 1: Sylvia Plath
-Synopsis: Plaths apostrophe complicates psychological states. Itthe you
recovered in Plaths poems excludes the readers and by making the readers excluded
she intensifies her power as a poet. Readers are embarrassed by apostrophe because it
seems both excessive and private, because we are both overhearing and meant to
overhear 49. Plaths attempt is to render apostrophe obsolete but it is still impossible
for forsake the lyric subject. She is concerned less with modifying the Romantic
prototype than with bursting through its limitations 43. The poet grants power to
apostrophized to overhear, but she undermines the possibility to fulfill the desire of
getting close to the apostrophized. In such a way she affirms her power, which, yet, in
her eyes, means death 48. The more rejection she has on the readers, the more
resemblance the readers has with the you in her poems 49.
-Inclusion and Exclusion: Glucks reading thus paradoxically inserts identification
into the poems apparent assertion of exclusion; the situation of overhearing lyric is
not for Gluck as lonely as it seems 29
-The models suggest that Plath is preoccupied with questions of power, dependency,
and communication 35 --- with Foucaults notion that confession is concerned with
power and domination 35 --- the apostrophized other is not simply the interlocutor
but the authority that Plath recuperates and renounces 35, changing the posture of
confession 36 --- The poet, in allowing the listener to overhear, grants power to that
listener; the poets apparent turning away from the reader, who is after all the only
listener the poem will have 36 --- self-obliteration, comes to terms with the futility
and the fictionality of invocation 36, suicide 36
-Intersubjective: on how apostrophe defines the speakers relation to Daddy 34,
connecting the emotional ambivalence of the poem with its rhetorical structure 35
Intertextual: on how the structure of apostrophe enacts and extends the apostrophe
conventions 34, emphasizing the apostrophe in the poems to earlier literary models 34
; considers the poems relation to the lyric tradition 35
-Prosopopeia and Apostrophe (differences) 143-44
Ch. 2: James Merill
-Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle 57
-Puns: mastery and lack of control over language 60

Vendler, Invisible Listeners

-horizontal and vertical human addresses 16 --- the you is also a vertical human
address --- apostrophes offer us tones of voice 18 through which they represent
various relations resembling those in life 18 --- redefine relations 18 --- renewed
intimacy ---- elastic space between the poet and the other 21 --- believable tonalities
22
-George Herbert: invisible God ; Walt Whitman: Reader-in-Futurity ; John Ashbery:
The Artist in the Past
-loss of intimacy with Gods love --- the poets belatedness in time 25 & distressing
distance 26 --- a parent figure, love, near-symmetrical relation with God, an identity
of feeling 30, from God to friends 31 --- from vertical intimacy with God to horizontal
intimacy with God 31 --- poetry is the situating/positing the relation, the intimacy, the
creation of action, the creation of intimacy 32 --- the Celestial Friends Mind echoes
our own 37, antiphony of gesture 39

**Apostrophe and Turning Away

Usher, Apostrophe in Greek Oratory
-Ancient rhetoricians, a rhetorical device, a figure of speech ---- Apostrophe, in its
etymological root in Greek, means turning away. It is an indirect address ---- look
away from everything else and towards ones objective 1 --- the effect is expected
to be dramatic 2 --- intensity in emotional arousal and rhetorical persuasion 2 --forensic oratory --- expose inadequacies (mistaken understandings between two
parties, wrongdoings, malice of opponents actions, logical absurdities and
inconsistencies, insult/lack of honesty) --- address a lack/loss/inharmony --- thrusting
the addressees character before an audience, in the age in which identity is more
aggressively asserted, they were stronger and better-defined characters than
comparatively self-effacing figures who preceded them --- the addressee is not
merely the speakers opponent, but also to the audience (indirect address and actually
the ultimate addressee in the oratory)

Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory_38-39

-whatever draws away from the hearer from the subject in question is called
apostrophe 6 --- draw in the something else

Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory_63

-the figure of speech by which the orators address is turned from the judge

[You] Smith, Apostrophe, or the Lyric Art of

Turning Away
-Differences between lyrical apostrophe and oratorical apostrophe 2
-The You 2 ; Smith in his abstract argues that the you is important --- The you
is not a you but another projected me who will speak the poem and attune his
speaking to its represented speech 8 --- lyric removes the address-response
communication that it holds the power of attunement 8 [see Stanley Cavell,
attunement in criteria in The Claim of Reason ; Paul Celan on Meridian Speech of
1960] --- Smith is putting the stake on the lyric readers --- Paul Celan: Voice
-The oldest sense of apostrophe in Greek oratory 3
-denial, iterability, traidicity 3 (the most basic possibilities of apostrophe 19)
-what is meant by address 3
-Between I and You there is a third realm neither human nor natural but
something lingering like love (Culler) 3 --- the third, that is a you that does not
answer 18, a projection of me 21, perpetuate the self, that enacts possibilities
and demands of attunement in speech 21 ; Smith analyzes the I and You in
terms of the circuit of communication, comparing the everyday circuit of
communication and the lyric in the communicative exchanges of I and You 3 ;
Culler says that the lyric presupposes the potential listener who is presupposed to be
responsive and animate, while Smith emphasizes that the you who does not answer
4 ---- it is a verbal attunement more than verbal alignment since no one actually
answers 4 --- I take Cullers side more: we have to hold onto the presupposition that
someone will answer more than focus on the reality that no one would answer --- no
call-answer, address-response pattern 7
-Spokeness 4 (Mouth), Denial 5 (the denial of the nonresponsiveness of the you,
freedom, sympathetic 8), Iterability, Traidicity (the I and the You are empty and can
be filled in differently every time in each spoken iteration) 5, 9 (emptiness of
formal pronouns)
-Attunement: attuned to context and occasion 8 (Culler: character of the event) --call into question the way the addressed answers 24 --- Wittgenstein: in agreement
from top to bottom, i.e. attunement, being in agreement throughout, in harmony (The
Claim of Reason:Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy Stanley
Cavell 32)
-Devotional lyric, prayer 9, address deity as a turning away from the you 11 ; Europe
before 18th -19th C: abstraction of audience 11
-Indicators: perfectly inhabitable 12
-poetry is the hesitation between sound and sense 15
-Paul Celan (The Meridian): voice, Oh art!, breath, language takes the physical
shape, get into the third (art), beyond what is human and steps into a realm which is
turned toward human, the oh art seems to be at home, uncanny side, the rattling voice
Valerio gets whenever art is mentioned, it must be in the air, the air we have to breathe
--- Art makes for distance from the I. Art requires that we travel a certain space in a
certain direction, on a certain road ---- poetry moves with the oblivious self into the
uncanny and strange to free itself. --- Lucile perceives language as shape, direction,
and breath (apostrophe) --- poetry is perhaps a turning of our breath 6, perhaps this
turn can sort out the strange from the strange 6 --- attention is the natural prayer of the
soul 8 --- you and otherness 8, the time, the occasion, the character of the event, the
attunement, not just I-you relationship but the attunement in the I-you relationship 8,
where from and where to 8 --- the poem is on the search of this place, on the search of
the you 8 --- want to be led to ad absurdum 8 --- language becomes voice 9 --- The

places do not exist but I believe where they ought to exist, that is now, for to be
aware of its existence one needs consciousness, that is the distance between the
subject and the object 10
-Sievers, On Paul Celans Meridian: Meridian is Paul Celans interpretation of his
own poetry, his auto-poetological statement ; the notions of poetry and encounter
-Perloff, Paul Celans Poetic Practice: two mouths of silence, intimate
alienation ; the dead speaking of stones and stars
OED
John Stuart Mill
Northrop Frye
Tucker
Helen Vendler
Barbara Johnson
Ann Keniston
William Waters
Paul de Man
Martin Buber (?)

**Wittgenstein
Wetzel, Wittgensteins Augustine
-inaugural passage, naming, human desire to be understood, temptation, confessional
(root of meaning)confession as a goal to be achieved in getting to know a thing
(idealized clarity)see Wittgensteins attunement, Cavells appealing to criteria ; the
meaning of words ; the be aware is to fictionalize 5 (Augstines fictionalized
memory) ; memory 5 ; Wittgenstein: Augustine gives a particular picture of the
essence of human language 6, the theory of meaning 6 ; desire-sign conjunction 7 ;
assign significance to his desires 7 ; DESIRE 8 (self-awareness, philosophical self,
meaning, desire, communication, transparency, idealism, complete, total, perfect,
absolute) ; question of meaning is different from question of use 8 ; Wittgensteins
critique of Augustine 8-9 ; the infant child, infancy itself seems to belong to no
one (infancy is the unreachable) 11 ; the moment of turning 11, Gods relating him
through a childs voice 12
-Logic, forms of life, meaning (See Frye: logic, grammar, rhetoric) 14
-The philosophical self is a metaphysical subject, the limit of the world 15 --- the
awareness to fictionalize 5 --- Nerudas transcendence as earthly --- turning to the
thing itself (leaving the I out, very different from the Romantic self) --- the
confession of a philosophical self:

17
(visual, apostrophe, no I)
-Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations is a confessional writer 18 --- shift of
focus in confession --- chooses conceptual perplexity over prayerful agony 18
-Confession and Condition 20 --- limits of life

Bearsley, Augustine and Wiggenstein on

Language
-Kenny has misinterpreted Wittgenstein ; disagree with Kenny in his criticisms of
Wittgensteins use of Augustine
-Wittgenstein sees Augustine fail to appreciate the great complexity of language
-meaning and use ; goes against Augustines ostensive definition as the root of
language 6 --- Augustine: learning to think presupposes learning to speak, but
Wittgenstein: learning to think comes along with learning to speak 7 ; Augustine:
verbal expressions as translation of inner feelings, while Wittgenstein: the
meaning of words are determined by the way they are used in the language-game
8 [Culler on apostrophe: not intensity of feelings, but to will a state of affairs]
-Augustine: name and the meaning of words 8
-Wittgenstein made great philosophical mileage out of the presuppositions of our
linguistic conventions 4
-Much of what Wittgenstein considered as natural was in effect learned 4
-The foundation of language is form of life, which is something given and has to be
simply accepted 5
-The quotidian 5 --- forms of life --- Speech Act Theory --- they are observations on
facts which no one has doubted, and which have gone unremarked only because they
are always before our eyes 5 (like what we do in terms of speech) --- of what human
nature is 5 --- The forms of life are what is given, not at birth, but when we learn to
speak and recognize things in the world 6
-Speech Act Theory: our view of the world which is grounded on what we do is
integral to an adequate understanding of our form of life 5
- Augustine: explains the meaning of word in terms of what it signified
Wittgenstein: explains the meaning of word in terms of its use 9

Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, 121-28

-Augustines awareness of intimacy between conversion and language learning, with
regard to Augustines appeal to Wittgenstein // conversion narrative, confession,
condition
-M. OC. Drury, recalling a remark of Wittgensteins, in Drury, Conversations with
Wittgenstein, Recollections of Wittgenstein, 1984, p90: Confessions is possibly the
most serious book ever written
-Norman Malcom, Luwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p71: Norman Malcom reports that
Wittgenstein told me he decided to begin his Investigations with a quotation from the
Confessions not because he couldnt find the conception expressed in that quotation
stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if
so great a mind held it
-How is Augustines greatness of mind connected with Wittgensteins thoughts about
language
-from self-unconsciousness to consciouseness 122 ; from Wilkur (acting without
responsiveness to any resonable norms, spontaneity, arbitrariness) to Wille (orderly
routines of action and coherent expressiveness, continence)
-the pursuit of completeness through the consumption of material things 123
-standing upon this rule of faith then enables genuine self-mastery and expressiveness
rather than self-dissipation 124
-The conversion is enabled by the active passiveness 124
-The significance of Augustines language-learning scene to Wittgenstein 125
-To think is to collect --- It is thought which makes language learning possible 126 --To be capable of language learning is to bear the power of conversion 126 --presence within language learning of an active power of thinking 127

127
-More on Augustine:

127 [Augustine: search for clarity]

-Naming relation: subject and object

128
-Wittgenstein: These words give us a particular picture of the essence of human
language 132 --- not sufficient 132 --- Wittgenstein: Augustines conception of
language is like such an over-simple conceptual of script --- Perhaps there is no
general notion of the meaning of a word. Perhaps that notion surrounds the
working of language with a haze which makes clear vision impossible. Perhaps we

would be better off to abandon any such notion and to cease theorizing the essence of
language altogether 139
-On Augustines picture: 132
-No explanation / self-sufficiency of language: No such thing was in question here,
only how the word five is used 134
-Five Red Apples 135 --- two voices (the explanation seeking voice and the rebuking
voice) --- to be aware / self-conscious is to fictionalize --- to think, to recollect, to
philosophize 135 --- Speech Act: five is a tool we use to do certain things 135
-The words of a language by their nature as tools in use admit of being turned and
twisted rather than being tied as though by steel to particular referents 137
-Apostrophe: express inner understandings in dealing with objects 137
-Apostrophe: neither sentence nor a word, but it is a call 144, part of an activity in the
world, and not any vehicle of representation 144
-Organic: the nature of mastery remains a mystery 138 --- the essence of language nad
our mastery of it eludes us 138, elude our conceptual efforts to specify it 139
-Understanding, meaning, definition: What is the nature of this power that lies at the
heart of our understanding of language? 141 --- No way and no need 144
-Routines and Practices:

142
-Words and World cannot be separated in terms of their essence 143
-Slab, Bring me a slab, Hand me a slab 145

In Praise of Limestone, Auden

-written in 1948 after his visit to Italy, a few years after the end of the Second World
War
-Critics: James Persoon, Anthony Hecht, Rebecca Price Parkin
-What is the landscape of praise when we see the landscape being praised? The object
of praise is turned into an exploration of the thing-ness of the praised object as well as
the rhetoric with regard to the thing-ness in the elicitation of the praise.
-Lines:
`I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'
On W. H. Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," Anthony Hecht
-landscape and personalities ; paysage moralise
-we are homesick for the landscape because it is like us (it dissolves as we become
dissolute) p70 // the landscape reminds of the Eden or childhood p70 // there is a

constant reminder of our mortality p71, the yearning for something is in the praise,
theres something missing/detached/not there yet in terms of the distance of time or
physical distance
-the doubleness of limestone, like human p71
-prehistoric happiness 77
Yales Lecture on Auden, Hammer
-it is a poem of praise ; the landscape is porous: A landscape that is Auden's version of
an earthly paradise and our only image of these ultimate promises. Auden manages somehow
here to make us see and feel what the life to come might be like, what it might be like to be
blessed, while still acknowledging that we can only live in and be in and speak in the world
before us, which is the one that Auden remains, throughout his poetry, dedicated to.

Martin Harrison
Happiness
-looking: Poplars 16 ; Summer Rain Front, North Coast 24
-Softness / Eating: theyre softness (a word hard to stomach in poems) 18
-Shape: About Bats 19
-birdlike mood: (birdlike because always moving, / perching, quickly alarmed,
sharp) 25
-Space / time: a gull hovering battling the air its interminable / no less than the part
of the present Im not living in 29, Watching time float, as if it balances every way
while things which move / seem to move nowhere 36
-happiness: A brief downpour opens up a world called happiness / carrying the
thought of you, the touch of you, / when, right now, its absence breaks my heart 36
-Whiteness: if all these would make sense suddenly (in a burst of light) / (in the
white outflow of a breaking wave) (in a quick overjoyed memory of you) 38
-Still-life: incomprehensible longing searching for words, / words turning out later to
be the simplest thoughts: / there on the table, a bunch of yellow and gold
bottlebrushes / leaning away from each other akimbo in a grey Japanese vase 39

William Waters, Poetrys Touch: On Lyric Addresses

-[Intimacy] The act of address itself as an emblem of the lovers connectedness 33 ;
the speaker is enacting although the speaker is not speaking 35 ; a withdrawal of the
addressee but not a withdrawal of the speaker 35 (Chowder: a withdrawal of the
speaker, a foregrounding of the addressee --- but this is actually foregrounding the
speaker, a weakening of the addressee) --- The voice that speaks in address 36
-The image of the mirror combines two elements: the reversal of the way things
naturally are 45
-an unreliable oscillation between what is and what is wished for 46

Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground

of Social Life
-Translation
-a deeper relation
-we-intentionality 181 --- what structures my interests in this reading of the poem 185

Things
// Willard, testimony of the invisible man: William Carlos
Williams, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda
[Inter]
Introduction
-Ponge: Truth is not the conclusion of a systemtruth is simply that 9
-Nerudas Impure Poetry 9-10 --- Give me sorrow and I will transform it into
hope --- the message is not just turning something negative into positive --- For art is
not a selection from the world but a transformation of it into something that praises
existence 10 --- Praise, affirmation, intimacy, unity, interpret light --acknowledgment of existence 10
Ch.5: Radiant Bread for the Sun of Man: Pablo Neruda
-Ode to Bread 013
-The answers you find will not look like answers at all but more like experiences,
Neruda writes: I did not come here to solve anything, I came here to sing 84
-he rejoices in the physical acts that bind us together and to the earth: walking,
eating, sleeping, making love. For he cannot speak and be heard unless his hearers
have this readiness, too 91-92
-Odes (start from p92) --- love 93
-Nerudas description is to make you remember what you already know as if you did
not know it 96 --- They start by making the thing unfamiliar to you and end by
making it new 96, but Neruda is no imagist. Seeing a thing well is not enough; he
wants you to love it 96 --- Consciousness: when you stand in the universe of the
elephant and ask what man is, you will not find him the conqueror of nature he
believes himself to be 98 --- Neruda loses himself in things 99: The innocence of
the elephant is the innocence all nature has when you step outside human progress to
see it. It is an Eden that needs death to continue; yet it is still Eden, because the idea
of sin makes no sense here. Nature is both change and the state of grace that lets you
liv in the whole of life rather than in our sector of it. Like the ocean, it is always
washing the dead ashore; yet it absorbs them again so completely that Neruda asks,
Where do the griefs go? 99 --- He is lost in things!
-A Light from the Sea: bring us to see, in the end, / the sea moving, wave upon
wave, / and flower after flower, all the earth 99
-Subject-Object 100-101 --- he celebrates bread for being itself, not for being eaten
103 --- The I becomes we as Neruda no longer uses things to carry his private
emotions 103

-In Odes, Neruda says that things choose him to say their lives 101
-Nerudas accusing himself of his earlier poetry 101
-Poetry is not found by separating things but by bringing them together, in a blind
extension of love 102
-The Elemental Odes are Nerudas hymns to being alive 106 --- social hunger --Neruda makes it clear that our most intense experience of impermanence is not death
but our own isolation among the living 106
Ch.6 Legacy of the Invisible Man
-In the kingdom of man, religion is, as Rilke says, a direction of the heart. The artist,
like the saint, shows us how to love. To love, one must make ones self invisible 111
-When you start from the faith that there are no ideas but in things, you enter a world
of such strangeness and disorder that language itself seems utterly divorced from what
it has always described. To be transparent means to have an extraordinary negative
ability that lets you suspend all the ideas you live by 112
-Things: change from useful to mysterious 113 --- This change from useful to
mysterious does not happen in the world but in man himself, whenever he stops
treating the thing as an object and respects it as a presence 113 --- Presence: Gabriel
Marcel: When a being is granted to me as a presence, I cannot treat him as if he were
placed before me. The relationship arises between us surpasses my simple awareness
of him. For me he exists in an immediacy beyond all imagination mediation 113, To
the invisible man, nothing is an object and everything is a presence 113, Our
tragedy, says Williams, is our inability to communicate with one another, locked
within ourselves as we are and unable to utter the simplest things of importance 114,
you kneel, height becomes depth 114 --- Possibilities of We

Damon, Poetry and Cultural Studies [G-Book]

-Definition of poetry

3
-poetic activity, poetic practice, poetic parameters 4, open the boundary between
poetry and poetic activity --- honoring poesis in its broader etymological sense of
making 4 --- its acknowledged collective and social space is narrow 4 --- lyric has not
become an object of popular and mass culture studies 5:

5
--- larger enjoyment and engagement with the process of making and cultivating new
social practices of knowledge 6

8 [Aura]
-subject-object

8
-the uncanny in the poetic 10 ; poetic language and everyday life 10

11
-reconcile the aesthetic work and the aesthetic experience, Kant and Marx:

14

New Lyric Studies

[New Lyric Studies: PMLA, 2008 issue on New Lyric Studies ; Stephen Burt in his
article What is This Thing Called Lyric outlines the development of the New Lyric
Studies: The idea of New Lyric Studies set forth by Yopie Prins in Victorian Sappho
(1999), codified by Virginia Jackson in Dickinsons Misery (2005), summarized in a
special issue of PMLA in 2008, and Jacksons long entry of lyric in the new
Princeton Encyclopaedia ; Prins and Jackson later published Lyric Theory Reader ;
the lyrcization thesis: the idea that lyric is a genre is a historical manifestation that has

variations, tensions, and conflicts]

// Jackson, Who Read Poetry?

-the history of lyricization

// Culler, Why Lyric

-New lyric studies tries to rework the concept of lyric
-New Lyric Studies:

2
-Culler takes the lyric back to the Greek and Latin Literature: a song sung to the lyre,
lyric address, call to be calling, different from taking lyric as dramatic monologue
(speaker, situation, addressee, lyric speaker as a character in novel), poetic language
makes things happen, the lyric present, the distinctive lyric temporality, the patterning
of language (Frypes babble and doodle), lyric is a linguistic event/a foregrounding of
language, rhythm and bodily experience of temporality (establishes a condition of
experience/figures the givenness)
-Jacksons Dickinsons Misery

// Terada, After the Critique of Lyric

-The book Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism
-Historical manifestations, cultural and sociological constellations:

2
-Lyric: conceptless, non-conceptual lyric intensity
-Jacksons Dickinsons Misery
-Lyric Studies participates in the renewal of lyric ideology ; new ways of thinking
about lyric studies
-lyric and culture:

// Prins, Historical Poetics

-immediacy / mediation --- problematicize the overheard
-New Lyric Studies:

// Gourgouris, Poiein: Political Infinitive

-new modes of consciousness, structures of power
-the force of poiein: to form is to change form, performance, theatrical, radical
present, pertaining not to space but to action in space
-The political substance of poiein:

// Izenberg, Poems Out of Our Head

-From Intentional fallacy to New Criticism (Old Lyric Studies)
-New Lyric Studies: how human mind works, philosophy of mind:

2
-Reading a poem is a sensorium 4
-Possibility: mere experience as a more radical possibility than revelation 4
-Qualia 4 --- non-representational and non-cognitive
-Dickinson
-No conceptualization, subjective modality of experience:

5
-specialness to phenomenal experience

// Kaufman, Lyric Commodity Critique

-aesthetic illusion, aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic quasiconceptuality
-interaction, interdependence, and difference
-lyric maintains a special relation to language 5
-Effects / Essence / Speech acts in lyric 5 --- very good elaboration on Adornos view
of the possibility between the lyric poetry and the society 5

***
// Hunter, Lyric and its Discontents
// Burt, What is This Thing Called Lyric
-lyricization
-the lyric poetry that we see in the past is a modern creation
-lists out different definitions of lyric by different lyric critics
-the analysis of lyrics can reformulate the definition of lyric 5
-human presence, to have an experience 8, poetry and experience 11 (ref. Izenberg),
lyric as a mode rather than lyric as a genre 7,12
-Majorie Perloff:
8
-Lyric and Things:

8
-Qualia and Kant 9
-Historical nature of lyric is more important than looking at a definition of lyric 11
-Stanley Fish, Definition of Poetry, Recipe
-Inhabitation, Intimacy, in extension by us 15
-Opens the impossibility 16
-Elusiveness of lyric as a genre:

16
-Persons 17 --- lyric poetry disembodies 18 --- Barbara Johnson: the question of what
human being is raised and explicated by lyric cannot be answered by lyric

16

// Jackson & Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader

-resist definition

2
-The modern invention of lyric is always attributed to Romanticism 2
-Hegels Aesthetics: lyric as the pure representation of subjectivity and therefore to
further the spirit of the age 3 (the poet can move civilization forward in his perfect
self-expression 3) --- 19th C, lyric is a genre ever more a perfect idea rather than an
imperfect practice 3

-lyric poet always unconscious of an audience but unconsciously demanding an

audience 4
-19th C: lyric as an ideal ; 20th C: lyric as a real genre (turning away from audience,
poetry is overheard) 4
-Barbara Herrnstein Smith: lyric I --- historically indeterminate 5
-Makes an argument about the history of reading:

// Jackson, lyric entry in Princeton Encyclopedia

[lyric as an idea --- lyric as a genre (sonnets became popular) --- lyric as a genre of
personal expression (Nicolas Boileau) --- in modernity lyric became an idea that could
transcend genre --- 18th C poetics answered to the post-Enlightenment interest in the
systematic knowledge production and lyric ideal is turned into a defined genre with its
own identifiable and exchangeable features and rule ---- 20thC: lyric is used to
describe all the first-person poetry --- 20th C: New Criticism]
-the collective context of poetry in antiquity
-modern sense of lyric --- personal expressions, subjectivity, interiority, emotion
-ancient use of lyric --- Latin: exclusion of any narrative element ; and Pindars and
Horaces poems are referred as odes
-early modern period: nostalgic sense for Greek and Roman poems, description of
poems gradually do the work for the conception of the lyric as a genre
-After the sonnet of Patriarch: a new model of lyric subjectivity --- the subject of
modernity experiences himself as difference from himself
-lyric from idea to lyric as a genre
-Nicolas Boileaus publications --- represents a further step in the development of an
idea of the lyric as a genre of personal expression
-This division into a tripartite literary system in which the parts could work
dialectically to form a coherent whole that corresponded to the whole of human
comprehension (subjective, subjective-objective, objective) or the entirety of literary
possibility (when the cirlce is completely closed) profoundly altered the literary
critical function of literary genres and radically changed the understanding of lyric.
When lyric shifted from its earlier uses as nostalgic adjective or transcendent idea to
become part of a generic system, the history of poetic genres was, in turn, revised and
rewritten
-The history of lyric is the history of the ways an idea has become a genre and the
ways in which that genre has been manipulated by poets and critics alike
-Benjamin: the distance between modernity and lyric (the lyric is the lost ideal, the
poet is always trying to recover the irrecoverable)

Others

- Nouns are for bourgeois materialists.

First place salt on the tongue. Then use the thread

to stitch up the lips. What to do with the
cherries? Its too-loud tick kept us awake.
I had to move it to the next-door room.
Then the next. Then lag it at night like a
talkative bird. The heart is a zeppelin,
tethered and leaking. How can we help but
scoff? People with glass clocks shouldnt row boats.

[Sarah Howe, Pronouns are for Slackers]

-Lawrence: Writing poetry is a very physical act. I write with my whole body
[Wessman, Ralph. An Interview with Anthony Lawrence. Famous Reporter 23
(2001): 26-40] // Jonathan Levin: emotion is situatedness of experience rather than
connected with mind, deconstructing mind/body [Levin, Jonathan. Letter. PMLA 114
(1999): 1097-98] ; For Lawrence, the imagination can represent a distraction from
the aim of accurate description [Emily Bittos thesis, The Poetic Self in a Morethan-Human World: An Ecocritical Investigation of the Poetry of Judith Beveridge
and Anthony Lawrence, 2005, p48]