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New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 4, Autumn 2009, pp. 879-899 (Article)
R
alph Cohen founded New Literary History in 1969, inaugurating
the first of a series of journals of literary theory that exercised a
powerful effect on criticism. Swiftly followed by diacritics (1970),
SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1973), Semiotexte (1974), and Critical Inquiry
(1974), New Literary History is the only one to have been led for forty
years by its founder, and I take this opportunity to pay homage to Ralph
Cohen for his remarkable record of continuing intellectual leadership,
as he hands over the journal to his younger colleagues. Established with
the goal of revitalizing literary history, which had fallen into disrepute
or at least neglect in the years of the New Criticism, the journal did not
initially succeed on that front, though it did give prominence to the
aesthetics of reception, which seemed at the time the most promising
candidate for renovating literary history.1 With a judicious sense of what
was important, Ralph Cohen made New Literary History a major forum
for the discussion and assimilation of European work in literary theory
and for interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary studies in the humanities.
In its eighth year, the journal changed the description offered on the
masthead to reflect what had become its central mission, welcoming
“theoretical articles on literature . . . and articles from other disciplines
that help interpret or define the problems of literary history or literary
study.” But Ralph Cohen remained in his own work faithful to the project
of rethinking literary history. His scholarship on James Thomson’s The
Seasons led to two monumental works, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s
“The Seasons” and the Language of Criticism, and The Unfolding of “The
Seasons,” which focused on problems of literary criticism by examining
the critical reception of a poem that was reprinted an amazing number
of times over the course of a century.
Above all, he saw to it that from time to time scholars returned to
the problem of genre. Periodically devoting special issues of the journal
to this unpopular topic, he kept it before us as a crucial concept for
literary history, perhaps even the major site of literary history, since if
literature is more than a succession of individual works, it may be at
the level of genre (the modifications of genres, the rise of new genres,
and the eclipse of the old), that literature has a history. But his claims
for genre and genre study are even broader: “Genre study is more than
another approach to literature or to social institutions or scientific
practices; it analyzes our procedures for acquiring and accumulating
knowledge, including the changes that knowledge undergoes.”2
In an article entitled “History and Genre,” Cohen quotes Fredric
Jameson’s claim in The Political Unconscious that genre criticism has been
“thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice,” and
he sets about efficiently and systematically to consider reasons for the
disparagement of the idea of genre and to elucidate a conception of
genre that can be defended against common criticisms.3 Though skepti-
cism about the idea of genre has remained powerful in literary studies,
I believe there are signs of a growing recognition of the importance of
generic categories. In 2007, PMLA devoted a special issue to “Remap-
ping Genre”; the subject of the September 2009 meeting of The English
Institute was simply “Genre”; and the so-called “new lyric studies” has
sparked a lively debate about the validity and bearing of the notion of
the lyric as a genre.4 It seems timely to take up the sort of argument of-
fered by Ralph Cohen’s discussion of the category of genre, its relation
to history and importance to literary studies.
Traditionally, theorists say there are two sorts of theories of genres,
empirical and theoretical; the latter is based on some claim about el-
ementary possibilities of thought, representation, or discourse. Aristotle
distinguishes literary types according to the possible modes and objects of
representation. Northrop Frye bases genre categories on “radicals [root
forms] of presentation”: “words may be acted in front of a spectator,
they may be spoken in front of a listener, they may be sung or chanted,
and they may be written for a reader”—fundamental possibilities, which
for him yield drama, epic, lyric, and narrative fiction.5 Goethe spoke of
the “drei echte Naturformen der Dichtung” (three pure natural forms
of poetry): epic, dramatic, and lyric, which he distinguished from the
variety of Dichtarten, which one might translate as empirical genres:
ballads, drama, epistles, fables, ode, novel, parody, romance, et cetera.6
The alternative to theories of genres based on logical divisions of a
sphere of possibilities would be such empirical genres, groupings that
are observed or practiced, based on principles other than theoretical.
Empirical genres would be lists of whatever genres people believe exist,
some based on form, others on content—classifications that do not seem
very logical—like the categories we find in bookstores.
Now these do seem to be two different conceptions of genre, which we
could call theoretical and historical, but I believe that in separating the
two conceptions one obscures fundamental aspects of genre and creates
the sort of confusion that contributes to the tendency to dismiss genres.
lyric, history, and genre 881
Classifications are empirical, not logical. They are historical assumptions con-
structed by authors, audiences, and critics in order to serve communicative
and aesthetic purposes. Such groupings are always in terms of distinctions and
interrelations, and they form a system or community of genres. The purposes
they serve are social and aesthetic. Groupings arise at particular historical mo-
ments, and as they include more and more members, they are subject to repeated
redefinitions or abandonment.8
far they help relate a work to others and activate aspects of works that
make them rich, dynamic, and revealing, though it is crucial to stress
that interpretation of individual works is not the goal of poetics, which
seeks to understand how systems of literary discourse work.
What about lyric, then, which constitutes a particularly interesting
generic problem? Aristotle has little to say about it. Lyric was an impor-
tant literary mode of his day but, perhaps because it is fundamentally
nonmimetic, it is not taken up in the Poetics. Lyric was finally made
one of three fundamental genres during the romantic period, when a
more vigorous conception of the individual subject made it possible to
conceive of lyric as mimetic: mimetic of the experience of the subject.
Distinguished by its mode of enunciation, where the poet speaks in
propria persona, lyric becomes the subjective form, with drama and epic
as alternately the objective and the mixed, depending on the theorist.
Hegel gives the fullest expression to the romantic theory of the lyric,
whose distinguishing feature is the centrality of subjectivity coming to
consciousness of itself through experience and reflection.9 The lyric poet
absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner con-
sciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity.
This conception of the lyric no longer has great currency in the
academic world. In a notorious article, “Genre Theory, the Lyric and
Erlebnis,” René Wellek concludes that the idea of lyric, at least in the
conception inherited from the poetic theory of German romanticism as
an expression of intense subjective experience, does not work. “These
terms cannot take care of the enormous variety, in history and differ-
ent literatures, of lyrical forms and constantly lead into an insoluble
psychological cul de sac: the supposed intensity, inwardness and imme-
diacy of an experience which can never be demonstrated as certain and
can never be shown to be relevant to the quality of art. … The way out
is obvious,” he continues; “One must abandon attempts to define the
general nature of the lyric or the lyrical. Nothing beyond generalities
of the tritest kind can result from it.”10 Wellek proposes that we focus
instead on describing particular genres, such as the ode, elegy, and
song, their conventions and traditions—a not very promising strategy for
nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry, certainly, where many of the
most interesting lyrics do not seem to belong to those particular genres
or subgenres. It would be a major theoretical and practical failure to
ignore a vast group of poems, which in fact depend upon a conceptual
frame for their effect.
A more recent critique of “lyric” ends up with a surprisingly similar
conclusion. What some have called “the new lyric studies” is best ob-
served in Virginia Jackson’s book, Dickinson’s Misery and in a set of short
lyric, history, and genre 885
The claim is that the things of the world, addressed as subjects, would
desire, like all subjects, to transcend a purely material condition and
become spirit. If earth can be addressed and have desires, it must want
to be a spirit, to be invisible, and the speaker boldly agrees to help:
Erde, unsichtbar!
Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drangender Auftrag?
Erde, du liebe, ich will.
[Earth, invisible!
What is your urgent command if not transformaiton.
Earth, you darling, I will.]
Addressing the rose and urging it to speak and then to die seems a dif-
ferent sort of gesture here, for though it is certainly a distinctively poetic
act it has a social dimension missing in the Blake: the rose is lovely like
the lady, asked to serve as a concrete instantiation of the poetic act of
comparison, but it is also the messenger, the go-between, a metonymical
extension of the speaker. By invoking the rose, this speaker does not so
much constitute himself as bardic voice as engage in social indirection.
By apostrophizing the rose rather than addressing the beloved directly,
and telling the rose what to say to the beloved, the speaker makes the
argument about virginity more gracious, less aggressive and self-serving,
than it would be if he directly told the imagined beloved, “suffer yourself
to be desired.” This apostrophic poem does indeed involve a turning
away from a possible empirical listener, the lady, to another addressee,
which is animated by this poetic address, but the animation is not an
intensification or an instantiation of bardic power so much as gracious
and witty indirection, a social gesture. Though there is a certain poetic
extravagance in willing the rose to speak, giving it lines to utter, and
directing it to die, the trope of apostrophe seems here to install us in
a social situation rather than extract us from it, as so often happens in
the apostrophic lyrics of the romantic period.
Frye’s model of lyric as address overheard (following John Stuart Mill’s
initial formulation) makes apostrophic address one possibility, but it also
allows for others, such as poems explicitly addressed to no one or noth-
ing, which are generally taken as meditative, as if we were overhearing
the poet speaking to himself or herself, and poems addressed to persons,
lyric, history, and genre 891
Cornell University
Notes
1 When the historicist turn in literary studies did come in the 1980s and 1990s, it was
with the New Historicism championed by Representations which seemed no more hospitable
to the practice of literary history than the New Criticism had been.
2 Ralph Cohen, introduction to “Theorizing Genres I,” NLH 34, no. 2 (2003): v.
3 Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” NLH 17, no. 2 (1986): 203.
4 “Remapping Genre,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007). See the section “The New
Lyric Studies” in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008). The original manifesto for this move-
ment is Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture
(1999), 521–30.
5 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957),
247.
6 The Dictarten are listed alphabetically: “Allegorie, Ballade, Cantate, Drama, Elegie,
Epigramm, Epistel, Epopee, Erzählung, Fabel, Heroide, Idylle, Lehrgedicht, Ode, Parodie,
Roman, Romanze, Satyre.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Noten und Abhandlungen
zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Diwans,” in Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 2:187–89.
7 Gérard Genette, The Architext, An Introduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of
California Press, 1992), 65–6.
8 Cohen, “History and Genre,” 210 (hereafter cited in text).
9 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 2:1113.
10 René Wellek, “Genre Theory, the Lyric and Erlebnis,” Discriminations (New Haven,
CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 251–2.
11 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), 84–8;
Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984); Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of
Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 7.
12 Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture
(1999), 521–30.
13 See Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008).
898 new literary history
and belief by which a society or culture lives.” This holds, he argues, for the audience of
Thucydides, Plato, and Sappho. And of course Horace aspires to revive the Greek lyric
tradition of Sappho and Alcaeus.
35 Jeffrey Walker, “The View from Halicarnassus: Aristotelianism and the Rhetoric of
Epideictic Song,” in New Definitions of Lyric, ed. Mark Jeffreys (New York: Routledge, 1998),
19–21.
36 Bruce Robbins, “Afterword,” PMLA 12, no. 5 (October 2007): 1648.
37 Earl Miner, an eminent comparatist of Asian literatures as well as English, observes:
“Lyric is the foundation genre for the poetics or literary assumptions of cultures through-
out the world. Only Western poetics differs. Even the major civilizations that have not
shown a need to develop a systematic poetics (the Islamic, for instance) have demonstrably
based their ideas of literature on lyric assumptions.” “Why Lyric?” in The Renewal of Song :
Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice, ed. Earl Miner and Amiya Dev (Calcutta: Seagull
Books, 2000). And he adds “The first thing to be said of lyric poetic systems is that they
are not mimetic.”
38 Robbins, “Afterword,” 1650.
39 A. R. Ammons, Bosh and Flapdoodle (New York: Norton, 2005), 22–4.