Jonathan Culler & Francesco Giusti Discuss the Lyric

Next week, Jonathan Culler will be one of the keynote speakers at "the first biennial conference of the recently founded International Network for the Study of Lyric," Francesco Giusti writes. At Los Angeles Review of Books, Giusti begins his interview with Culler alluding to their shared interest in the lifespan of the lyric, as a literary form. Giusti writes, with a nod to Culler's 2015 study: "Theory of the Lyric struck me as a long-awaited authoritative affirmation of an idea that has informed my own critical work for years. I am referring to your view of the Western lyric as an uninterrupted literary genre, which extends, basically undisturbed, from Archaic Greece to the present." Let's pick up with their conversation, from there:

FRANCESCO GIUSTI: Your book can be seen as a demonstration of this general premise, based on the notions of rituality (which involves rhythm, performance, iterability, and discursive indirectness) and event (which is contrasted with mimesis, representation, and narrative).

Literary criticism still seems to be much more interested in tracing boundaries than in pursuing wide-ranging perspectives. Indeed, the idea that post-Romantic lyric poetry cannot be seriously compared with classical, medieval, or even Renaissance poetry, appears to be quite persistent. This is probably because it’s so difficult to look at the inner workings of the lyric text without viewing its “subject” within the context of historical conceptions of subjectivity, and without relating the text to its historical context of production. Would you comment on your proposal of a continuity based on reception and tradition — on the fact that, say, a Romantic poet could read (and thus reenact) an ancient Greek “lyric” poem?

This is related to the nonlinearity and reversibility of literary history; as you maintain, a literary genre can be unexpectedly revived centuries after its first appearance, when it seemed to be definitively gone. I totally agree with your claim, but I am curious to know what major discontinuities, if any, you detect along the almost three-millennia-long tradition of the lyric as a ritual. More specifically, do you think that the cultural and religious transformation that occurred in medieval Europe — from the pagan classical world to Latin Christendom — changed the rite of the lyric in any significant way?

JONATHAN CULLER: For me there are two important points. The first is a logical one: in order to talk about changes in the lyric over the course of history, however massive we might take them to be, we need to posit that there is such a thing as the lyric, or, shall we say, the Western lyric tradition, which has a history. Second, given that there is a history of the Western lyric, I have been inclined to stress continuities, in part because the historicist-contextualist criticism that is currently dominant in the United States is eager to declare discontinuities. At a time when literary studies is dominated by professors who specialize in particular historical periods, it seems to me especially important to identify not just continuities but the parameters within which historical changes may take place; though, as you say, I have wanted to stress that the history of the lyric, unlike many other sorts of history, does seem reversible, in that forms which fall out of favor may be revived and given new life.

Read on at Los Angeles Review of Books