Rethinking Lyric Communities

In contemporary Western societies, lyric poetry is often considered an elitist or solipsistic literary genre. Yet a closer look at its history reveals that lyric has always been intertwined with the politics of community formation, from the imagining of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in episodes of collective action, protest, and social resistance. Poetic forms have circulated between languages and traditions from around the world and across time. But how does lyric poetry address or even create communities and of what kinds? This volume takes a global perspective to investigate poetic communities in dialogue with recent developments in lyric theory and concepts of community. In doing so, it explores both the political potentialities and the perils of lyric poetry.

Contenu

• Rethinking Lyric Communities: Introduction / Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, Laura Scuriatti - Lyric Address and the Problem of Community / Jonathan Culler - Millay Repairs Baudelaire / Sabine I. Gölz - Gestural Communities: Lyric and the Suspension of Action / Francesco Giusti - Rabindranath Tagore's /Samaj/Communities of Song / Peter D. McDonald - The Transnational Lyric Community of Soviet Unofficial Music under Late Socialism / Philip Ross Bullock - Mina Loy's Interrupted Communities / Laura Scuriatti - Lyric Poetry and Community Good: Kaaps and the Cape Flats / Derek Attridge - Casting Dispersions: Revising Lyric Privacy in Simone White's Of Being Dispersed / Wendy Lotterman - 'So Clear That One Can See the Breaks': Colonialism, Materiality, and the Lyric in Jen Bervin's The Desert / Toby Altman - Lyric, Detachment, and Collectivity: On Carl Phillips's 'Hymn' / Hal Coase - Being a Perpetual Guest: Lyric, Community, Translation / Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, Laura Scuriatti, Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo