CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Aesthetics Contra "Identity"in Contemporary Poetry Studies

A Few Snapshots of the Current State of Poetry Reception

In the January 2008 issue of PMLA—the official publication of theModern Language Association (MLA) sent to more than thirty thousandmembers in one hundred countries—a cluster of essays by eightdistinguished literary critics appeared under the title "The New LyricStudies." The pieces took as their jumping-off point the eminentpoetry critic Marjorie Perloff's MLA presidential address, "It MustChange," given in December 2006 at the annual convention in Philadelphiaand later reprinted in the May 2007 issue of PMLA. In thattalk, Perloff asks, "Why is the 'merely' literary so suspect today?" (originalemphasis), contending that "the governing paradigm for so-calledliterary study is now taken from anthropology and history."

Because lyric has in our time become conflated with the moregeneric category of poetry, the PMLA forum serves to address notonly the state of lyric studies but, more broadly, the state of poetrystudies today. Nine critics may seem a small number—hardly representativeof the larger numbers of academic poetry critics in thecountry—but because of the influential reputations of the criticsinvolved (Perloff and Jonathan Culler in particular); because theMLA, despite the ridicule to which it is sometimes subjected, is thelargest, most powerful and influential professional organization forprofessors and academic critics of literature; and because the PMLAreaches a wider and broader audience than any other literary-criticaljournal, the views of these particular critics are highly visible andinfluential and cannot be easily discounted or dismissed. The MLAis one of what Edward Said calls the "authoritative and authorizingagencies" of culture in the Arnoldian sense (WTC, 8). Individualarticles in PMLA may be overlooked, but statements by high-profilemembers about the state of the field of literary criticism—especiallywhen marked by an adjective such as "New"—are often noticed andby a not insignificant number of readers.

In quite a few respects, the arguments made in "The New LyricStudies" were varied: from Culler's making the case for the specialnessof lyric—with its "memorable language" and its being "characteristicallyextravagant"—to Rei Terada's calling that we "[be] release[d]from lyric ideology" and "let 'lyric' dissolve into literature and 'literature'into culture" (Robert Kaufman, the requisite Marxist contributor,splits the difference by claiming, via Adorno and Benjamin, thatlyric is special precisely because it operates ideologically by the same"version of aura or semblance" that the commodity form does); fromStathis Gourgouris's and Brent Edwards's urging that lyric scholarsengage with truer and more incisive forms of interdisciplinarity; toOren Izenberg's assertion that "it makes good sense to bring literarystudy into closer proximity with the disciplines that give accounts ofhow the mind works," such as "the philosophy of mind, philosophicalpsychology, and metaphysics that deal with the nature of mentalphenomena and their relation not so much to the determinations ofculture as to the causal structure of reality." Virginia Jackson andYopie Prins both argue for more and better historicization: Jackson—pushing against the tendency to make poetry and lyric abstract, idealized,and transhistorical—urges that we "trace ... the history oflyricization"; Prins, that we examine "the cultural specificity of poeticgenres" and the history of poetics and prosody.

Yet despite the various methodological, disciplinary, and aestheticinclinations of the respondents, there are moments of agreement,some expected and others less so, sometimes cutting across thefamiliar "literary versus cultural" divide within literary studies. Notsurprisingly among scholars committed to the "literary," Culler, likePerloff, makes the familiar validating move of tracing the history oflyric back to the Greeks. Gourgouris, too, bolsters his arguments byappealing to the authority of ancient Greece (not so unexpected giventhat he works on Greek literature), taking Perloff slightly to task fortoo narrowly conceiving of poietike, which she translates as "the disciplineof poetics." But Gourgouris—who makes the point that Perloff"does not inquire if 'poetics' can be conducted nowadays in a freshlanguage"—does agree with her claim that literary studies has takena wrong turn, though for him the reasons are internal to the fieldand not, as Perloff suggests, because interdisciplinarity, in the form ofanthropological and historical paradigms, has been a bad influence.Gourgouris writes in "Poiein—Political Infinitive,"

For a decade or more since 1990, the microidentitarian shift in theoryprecipitated a failure of self-interrogation, especially regarding the paradoxesof the new disciplinary parameters that emerged out of the practiceof interdisciplinarity. As a result, literary studies (and other disciplines)suffered, not so much a defanging, as Perloff implies, but rathercarelessness, perhaps even arrogance—one is a symptom of the other—whichled the discipline to abandon self-interrogation and insteadhop on the high horse of identity politics. In other words, if Perloff'sscenario for the relegation of literary studies to a secondary practice islegitimate, the devaluation is not external but self-induced. (224)

This moment is surprising in that Gourgouris, who...