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Abstract
Lyric Subjectivities attempts to think beyond reductive constructions of the subject that became commonplace during a contentious period in recent American poetry, when experimental writing worked to distance itself from lyric poetry. Language poets' suspicion of "persona-centered, 'expressive' poetry" led to a perceived "prohibition against the lyric I" among poets concerned with the materiality of language, and the signs of lyric subjectivity—voice and affect, for example—became increasingly associated with a straightforward poetry of lived experience. A remarkably static notion of lyric underlies both sides of the poetry wars, which assumes that, as Paul de Man writes, "a lyric text coincides with the actualization of a speaking voice." The assumption that lyric expresses—rather than constitutes—the subject fails to account for instances of lyric voice that, while subjective, cannot be fixed to a person or persona. In order to explore the radical possibilities for a semiotic lyric subjectivity, prematurely foreclosed by the polarized landscape of contemporary poetry yet active in many of its best practitioners, I focus in the following chapters on three remarkable writers of the past century whose works engage lyric in new ways: Virginia Woolf, Michael Palmer, and Anne Carson. I turn in my second chapter to Woolf's The Waves because this 1931 novel provides both a view of lyric subjectivity outside the confines of the poem and a heuristic for this dissertation's field of inquiry, since its detailed account of subject formation foresees the mid-century's far-reaching phenomenological, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theories of the subject. In chapter three, I argue that Palmer's "analytic lyric" explores the literal utopia, or "no-place," presented by what he alludes to as world with a "silent l"; this linguistic space allows Palmer to negotiate lyric's commitment to the particular with a semiotician's understanding of the nonequivalence between signifier and signified. Carson, whose works I address in chapter four, inherits part of her project directly from The Waves; the question that haunts the end of that book, "How to describe the world seen without a self," reappears in several of her hybrid texts, which return to the formal possibilities advanced by The Waves.
