Lyric Reading Revisited: Passion, Address, and Form in Citizen

AbstractThis article makes the case for a revised model of lyric reading. While theorists have thus far identified lyric reading with a monolithic, expressive model of lyric, the more capacious model I propose involves bringing the signature entanglements that have endowed the term lyric with historical freight and analytical richness to bear on the analysis of literary works—particularly on generically ambiguous contemporary works written during the era of what Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have called “lyricization.” The essay presents three recurring sites of debate in lyric theory, using each to bring distinct aesthetic and political dimensions of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) into focus. Meditating on contested, rather than putatively universal, features of lyric and their imprint upon Rankine’s “American lyric” reveals the urgent matters of value that such features comprehend. To explore them is to explore the racial subconscious of the lyric tradition and recover how lyric has been multiply and alternatively conceived.