Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T02:07:09.001Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rachel Cole
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Lyric poetry's investment in structural delimitation has been read as a commitment to the exclusion of otherness and more specifically of other people. But delimitation need not be synonymous with exclusivity. Giorgio Agamben suggests that lyric closure and the satisfaction it affords may be a model for achieving peace with the other—a model of how we might find, in or with another, not merely alterity but contentment. Wallace Stevens offers examples of how such contentment might be realized between text and reader, as an effect of the bounded aural intensity of lyric language. Agamben's poetics and Stevens's poems complicate our assumptions about the sociality of lyric structure. In addition, they offer a provocative alternative to the Levinasian models that influence much of our current thinking about ethics.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 2 , March 2011 , pp. 383 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. “The End of the Poem.” The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 109–15. Print.Google Scholar
Altieri, Charles. “Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Ed. Davis, Todd F. and Womack, Kenneth. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. 30–58. Print.Google Scholar
Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20–31. Print.Google Scholar
Beehler, Michael. “Penelope's Experience: Teaching the Ethical Lessons of Wallace Stevens.” Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays. Ed. Serio, John N. and Leggett, B. J. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. 267–79. Print.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976. Print.Google Scholar
Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. The Violence Within / The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Bruns, Gerald L. “Stevens without Epistemology.” Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Gelpi, Albert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 24–40. Print.Google Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7–19. Print.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. 135–54. Print.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 201–06. Print.Google Scholar
Eskin, Michael. “Bakhtin on Poetry.” Poetics Today 21.2 (2000): 379–91. Print.Google Scholar
Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Mark. Stevens and the Interpersonal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haney, David P. “Aesthetics and Ethics in Gadamer, Levinas, and Romanticism: Problems of Phronesis and Techne.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 32–45. Print.Google Scholar
Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.” Writing/Talks. Ed. Perelman, Bob. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985. 270–91. Print.Google Scholar
Jackson, Virginia, and Prins, Yopie. “Lyrical Studies.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 521–30. Print.Google Scholar
Jeffreys, Mark. “Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics.” PMLA 110.2 (1995): 196–205. Print.Google Scholar
Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. New York: Knopf, 1975. Print.Google Scholar
Lentricchia, Frank. The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.Google Scholar
Mao, Douglas. “Wallace Stevens for the Millennium: The Spectacle of Enjoyment.” Southwest Review 85.1 (2000): 10–33. Print.Google Scholar
Patke, Rajeev. “Stevens, the Orient, and the Feminine: Versions of the Other.” Ariels: Departures and Returns: Essays for Edwin Thumboo. Ed. Kiong, Tong Chee, Pakir, Anne, Choon, Ban Kah, and Goh, Robbie B. H. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 370–90. Print.Google Scholar
Rosu, Anca. The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Salecl, Renata. “The Satisfaction of Drives.” UMBR(a) (1997): 105–09. Print.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Marianne, and Shapiro, Michael. “Dialogism and the Addressee in Lyric Poetry.” University of Toronto Quarterly 61.3 (1992): 392–413. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shinbrot, Victoria. “The Lyric Element and the Prosaic World in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West.‘” Wallace Stevens Journal 29.2 (2005): 263–74. Print.Google Scholar
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. Print.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Stevens, Holly. New York: Vintage, 1990. 367–68. Print.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. “Man and Bottle.” The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Stevens, Holly. New York: Vintage, 1990. 173–74. Print.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1965. 1–36. Print.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry.” The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Stevens, Holly. New York: Vintage, 1990. 174–75. Print.Google Scholar
Vincent, John. Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waters, William. “Rilke's Imperatives.” Poetics Today 25.4 (2004): 711–30. Print.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. “Passionate (Dis)Attachments; or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud.” The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. 247–312. Print.Google Scholar