Book Section
Investigation of the contribution of address to a wide variety of lyric communities begins with songs sung at sporting events, before moving to lyric poems from Petrarch to Ashbery. Direct address to readers is one possibility, but the ambiguous you in many poems may be more effective. We, by contrast, seems either presumptuous or merely wishful. Finally, the assumption that the formation of lyric communities is necessarily a good thing is challenged.
Keywords: you; we; song; Ashbery; Baudelaire; Petrarch; Whitman
Title
Lyric Address and the Problem of Community
Author(s)
Jonathan Culler
Identifier
Description
Investigation of the contribution of address to a wide variety of lyric communities begins with songs sung at sporting events, before moving to lyric poems from Petrarch to Ashbery. Direct address to readers is one possibility, but the ambiguous you in many poems may be more effective. We, by contrast, seems either presumptuous or merely wishful. Finally, the assumption that the formation of lyric communities is necessarily a good thing is challenged.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
28 October 2024
Subject
you
we
song
Ashbery
Baudelaire
Petrarch
Whitman
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
15
page end
29
Source
Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 15–29

Publication scheduled for 28 October 2024

References

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Cite as: Jonathan Culler, ‘Lyric Address and the Problem of Community’, in Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 15-29 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-30_01>