What is Lyric ? Conference by Jonathan Culler (Cornell University)
Mercredi 6 avril 2016 - 13h15 - Internef UNIL - Dorigny - 231
Prof Culler will be discussing his recent book, Theory of the Lyric, in which he offers the following challenge to current teachers and students of poetry, of all historical eras:
'The conception of lyric ... as a representation of the action of a fictional speaker... spoken by a persona, whose situation and motivation one needs to reconstruct ... has become the dominant model in the pedagogy of the lyric in the Anglo-American world, if not elsewhere... this model deflects attention from what is most singular, most mind-blowing even, in those lyrics, and puts readers on a prosaic, novelizing track: [it] gives students a clear task but it is extraordinarily limited and limiting. It leads to neglect of the most salient features of many lyrics, which are not to be found in ordinary speech acts'