Faculty of English the Spirit of Exemplarity
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Faculty of English The Spirit of Exemplarity: The Role of Example in Lyric Studies Christopher Mark Geddes Scott Trinity College University of Cambridge This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, March 2019 Prefatory Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography and translations, where they have been provided only to aid understanding. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. The Spirit of Exemplarity: The Role of Example in Lyric Studies Christopher Scott Abstract Recent work in lyric studies has been dominated by two opposing camps: the historicism of the ‘New Lyric Studies’ and the attempt to defend a trans-historical category of lyric, most notably by Jonathan Culler. This thesis begins by claiming that these two camps have something in common: their practice of exemplification and their attitude towards individual example. Turning to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, I describe an alternative mode of exemplarity which, as Toril Moi attests, is now largely absent from the discipline of literary studies. The argument for a practice of exemplification in lyric criticism which attends to individual poems without an ultimate appeal to a general conception or the pursuit of historical and cultural knowledge risks being dismissed on the grounds that it is ‘New Critical’: politically and methodologically backward. My first chapter looks to trouble the ‘New Critical’ caricature which is so often invoked, especially in lyric studies, as a means of warding off ways of thinking and reading. As I examine the term ‘New Criticism’ with reference to a number of commentators, it becomes clear that it is unhelpfully diffuse, and that we need to re-visit many of the perceived critical flaws associated with it. My second chapter looks back to, and takes issue with, Jonathan Culler’s ‘Apostrophe’, which it considers both as an important work in the move beyond ‘New Criticism’ and as an emblematic essay for theoretical approaches to lyric poetry. I continue to take Culler’s work as an example of the theoretical approach to lyric in chapter three, as we investigate the development of ‘Apostrophe’ in the influential Theory of the Lyric, with particular attention to J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida. My fourth chapter moves the thesis into a more positive mood, as it looks first at the way in which the argument of this thesis might be situated in relation to ‘post- critical’ work, before arguing for and describing a practice of wide critical attention to be paid as we consider individual poems and our encounters with them. Such a practice, I make clear throughout the thesis with reference to the recent work of Joseph North, is incompatible with the currently dominant paradigm of literary study, and we’ll consider in an afterword potential changes to the discipline which might be necessary to enable work in this spirit of exemplarity to become standard, taking its place alongside scholarly work which aims to produce cultural and historical knowledge. My final chapter turns to individual lyric poems (a Greek epitaph, a medieval lyric, and a Wordsworth poem), seeking to enact the kind of critical work for which the thesis has argued, while continuing its project of expanding the range of examples typically considered in attempts to create models of lyric. As we read the poems, particular attention will be paid to how they interact with claims that lyric poems are events, not objects, and with discussions about repeatability and literary value. Contents Acknowledgements p. i Introduction p. 1 – Traditional examples p. 1 – Wittgenstein and example p. 7 – Jonathan Culler’s practice of exemplarity in Theory of the Lyric p. 22 Chapter one: lyric studies, close reading, and the ‘New Criticism’ p. 29 – Introduction: ‘New Criticism’ and lyric studies p. 29 – Close reading today p. 32 – Back to the ‘New Critics’ p. 37 – Back to the scholarly turn p. 44 – One moment of polemic p. 49 Chapter two: apostrophe p. 56 – Introduction: the reason for the return p. 56 – ‘Apostrophe’, the ‘New Critics’, and cognitive rhetoric p. 56 – Dissenting voices from within literary studies p. 66 – Classical origins and their role in ‘Apostrophe’ p. 69 – Adonais and discursive time p. 75 – ‘Sonnet’: towards a different account p. 81 Chapter three: Theory of the Lyric and iterability p. 93 – Introduction: transition from ‘Apostrophe’ to Theory of the Lyric p. 93 – Lyrics and pop songs p. 97 – Iterability p. 99 – Encounter p. 107 Chapter four: a ‘realistic spirit’ p. 109 – Models, methods, and spirits p. 109 – Following Empson p. 115 – A realistic spirit, from the ground up: justifying ‘literature’ p. 121 – Wide attention p. 128 Chapter five: towards a ‘sort of collection of examples’ p. 132 – Preface p. 132 – Example one: ‘A god, and yet a man?’ and literary value p. 134 – Example two: ‘The Two April Mornings’ and repetition p. 151 – Example three: Leonidas, ambiguity, object p. 162 Afterword p. 171 Bibliography p. 178 Acknowledgements I thank Ross Wilson, who took over as my supervisor in my third year of the PhD, for his invaluable help with strengthening this thesis’s thesis, for his many illuminating comments and suggestions, and his counter-arguments, always offered in a constructive spirit, which unfailingly helped me to think further about and defend my own. I owe him a debt of gratitude for stepping in at such a late stage, taking on a student in need of quite a bit of attention. Too many individuals, to have recourse to a truism of the acknowledgements page, have contributed to the development of this thesis for me to thank them all without boring the reader (and perhaps risking being seen to over-estimate the achievement contained in these pages!). But I’d like to thank, in particular, but in no particular order: Jackie Tasioulas, for her inspirational teaching of medieval literature, and for giving me confidence in a place where self-confidence is hard to find; Adrian Poole, for his kind, attentive, and unfailing guidance; Andrew Broughton, for teaching me and so many other pupils with such talent, skill, and attention; Joe Moshenska, for his spirit of using and taking from various critical methods and theories without subscribing to them; Jessica Martin, for teaching me how to write a dissertation; and Anne Stillman, for teaching me how to think differently. I would also like to thank Robbie Lyon and Mitch Bibby, for their constant support and friendship; my mother, for, amongst so many other things, always being on the end of the phone; and Grace, for her love, belief, and encouragement. Two people passed away in the course of my writing this thesis to whom I would like to dedicate it: Eric Griffiths, who inspired and taught so many of those who have inspired and taught me; and Jean Robinson, my grandmother, whose humility and good company I miss deeply. i Introduction ‘Do you mean anything particular – just now?’ ‘No, I mean something general – always.’1 Tout exemple cloche.2 Traditional examples There is a moment in Hegel’s Aesthetics which appears to play a significantly similar role in the thought of two recent theorists of lyric poetry whose differences are more often brought to our attention: To define the poetic as such or to give a description of what is poetic horrifies nearly all who have written about poetry. And in fact if a man begins to talk about poetry as an imaginative art without having previously examined what art’s content and general mode of representation is, he will find it extremely difficult to know where to look for the proper essence of poetry. But the awkwardness of his problem especially increases if he starts from the individual character of single works and then proposes to assert some universal derived from this character and supposed to be valid for the most varied genres and sorts of poetry. Along these lines the most heterogeneous works count as poetry. If this assumption is presupposed and the question is then raised: By what right should such productions be recognised as poems? the difficulty just mentioned enters at once. Fortunately, at this point in our discussion we can evade this difficulty. In the first place, we have not reached the general conception of the matter in hand by deriving it from single examples; on the contrary, we have endeavoured to develop the real exemplifications of this conception from the conception itself and consequently we cannot be required, e.g. in the sphere we are dealing with now, to subsume under this conception whatever is commonly called a poem, because the decision on whether something actually is a poetical production or not is to be derived solely from the conception of poetry itself.3 From this, Jonathan Culler takes it as read that ‘Hegel rightly insists that a properly philosophical aesthetics seeks to grasp the logic of art and does not derive its conceptions of art from particular examples’; Virginia Jackson asserts that ‘[m]ost of us would agree with Hegel that to derive a general conception – a genre – from a single example is a logical mistake’.4 From this common position, the two critics go off in separate directions.