Book Section
Francesco Giusti
Recitation
Lyric Time(s) I
What is the time of the lyric? For Augustine, the recitation of a hymn illustrates the workings of time in the human mind; for Giorgio Agamben, the poem itself exemplifies the structure of what he defines as ‘messianic time’. By focusing on Dante’s sonnet ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ and looking at the double act of the recitation of the poem and the re-citation of prior gestures, the temporality of both the single poem and lyric discourse will come into focus.
Keywords: lyric; retrospection; reading; transhistoricism; reenactment; reference; iterability; performance; time; Augustine; Giorgio Agamben; Dante; recitation
Rights: © by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
| Title |
Recitation
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| Subtitle |
Lyric Time(s) I
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| Author(s) |
Francesco Giusti
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
What is the time of the lyric? For Augustine, the recitation of a hymn illustrates the workings of time in the human mind; for Giorgio Agamben, the poem itself exemplifies the structure of what he defines as ‘messianic time’. By focusing on Dante’s sonnet ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ and looking at the double act of the recitation of the poem and the re-citation of prior gestures, the temporality of both the single poem and lyric discourse will come into focus.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
22 January 2019
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| Subject |
lyric
retrospection
reading
transhistoricism
reenactment
reference
iterability
performance
time
Augustine
Giorgio Agamben
Dante
recitation
|
| Rights |
© by the author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
|
| Language |
en-GB
|
| page start |
35
|
| page end |
47
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| Source |
Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 35–47
|
References
- Agamben, Giorgio, ‘The End of the Poem’, in The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
- Agamben, Giorgio, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
- Attridge, Derek, The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014–16)
- Austin, John L., How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)
- Culler, Jonathan, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)
- Dante, Vita nova, ed. by Guglielmo Gorni (Turin: Einaudi, 1996); in English as Dante’s Vita Nuova . New Edition: A Translation and an Essay, ed. and trans. by Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973)
- Dante, Rime giovanili e della Vita nuova, ed. by Teodolinda Barolini, notes by Manuele Gragnolati (Milano: Rizzoli Bur, 2009)
- Eliot, T. S., ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), pp. 89–102
- Frye, Northrop, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)
- Genette, Gérard, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
- Giusti, Francesco, ‘The Lyric in Theory. A Conversation with Jonathan Culler’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 May 2017
- Gragnolati, Manuele, and Francesca Southerden, ‘Dalla perdita al possesso. Forme di temporalità non lineare nelle epifanie liriche di Cavalcanti, Dante e Petrarca’, Chroniques italiennes, séries web 32 (1/2017), pp. 136–54 <http://www.univ-paris3.fr/medias/fichier/gragnolati-southerden_1501152291404.pdf> [accessed 20 December 2018]
- Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
- Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins, eds, The Lyric Theory Reader. A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
- Johnson, W. Ralph, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)
- Mill, John Stuart, ‘What is Poetry?’, The Monthly Repository, n.s., 7 (1833), pp. 60–70
- Rabaté, Dominique, ‘Énonciation poétique, énonciation lyrique’, in Figures du sujet lyrique, ed. by Dominique Rabaté (Paris: PUF, 1996), pp. 65–79
- Rabaté, Dominique, Gestes lyriques (Paris: José Corti, 2013)
- Rabaté, Dominique, ‘A World of Gestures’, Journal of Literary Theory, 11.1 (2017), special issue Theories of Lyric, ed. by Claudia Hillebrandt, Sonja Klimek, Ralph Müller, William Waters, and Rüdiger Zymner, pp. 89–96 <https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2017-0010>
- Todorović, Jelena, Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)
Cite as:
Francesco Giusti, ‘Recitation: Lyric Time(s) I’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 35-47 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_05>