Byron’s Queer Lyric: “To Thyrza”
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay is a study of a particularly “queer” moment in Byron’s lyric poetry. In “To Thyrza,” a short poem Byron wrote in response to the death of John Edleston, a choirboy Byron fell in love with at Cambridge, the speaker struggles through an exceedingly convoluted and ambiguous passage to express his excruciating pain. In answer to this perplexing poem, this essay proposes a study of the correlation between queer desire and the lyric form in Byron’s poetry. The lyric is not a poetic form usually associated with Byron, and yet in “To Thyrza,” we find a poet who relies on the lyric voice to express what is the most private and dearest to his heart. Queer desire has always been a slippery slope for those who question the possibility of a proper language for desire, and poststructuralist theories of sexuality have looked to language as a site of displacement and substitution for illicit desire. This essay’s reflection on queer lyric is an intervention into this poststructuralist perspective. Lyric poetry is a peculiar fusion of voice and text, and the intrinsic tension between these two linguistic impulses in the lyric has us wonder what the lyric voice can do beyond and against textual displacements of desire. When the lyric voice makes itself heard somewhere outside the structure of the text, it makes space for the voice of displaced desire to reverberate as in an echo box. Queer lyric resides in that space, and this essay’s reading of Byron’s “To Thyrza” contemplates the radical possibility of such a queer lyric.
Abstract
This essay is a study of a particularly “queer” moment in Byron’s lyric poetry. In “To Thyrza,” a short poem Byron wrote in response to the death of John Edleston, a choirboy Byron fell in love with at Cambridge, the speaker struggles through an exceedingly convoluted and ambiguous passage to express his excruciating pain. In answer to this perplexing poem, this essay proposes a study of the correlation between queer desire and the lyric form in Byron’s poetry. The lyric is not a poetic form usually associated with Byron, and yet in “To Thyrza,” we find a poet who relies on the lyric voice to express what is the most private and dearest to his heart. Queer desire has always been a slippery slope for those who question the possibility of a proper language for desire, and poststructuralist theories of sexuality have looked to language as a site of displacement and substitution for illicit desire. This essay’s reflection on queer lyric is an intervention into this poststructuralist perspective. Lyric poetry is a peculiar fusion of voice and text, and the intrinsic tension between these two linguistic impulses in the lyric has us wonder what the lyric voice can do beyond and against textual displacements of desire. When the lyric voice makes itself heard somewhere outside the structure of the text, it makes space for the voice of displaced desire to reverberate as in an echo box. Queer lyric resides in that space, and this essay’s reading of Byron’s “To Thyrza” contemplates the radical possibility of such a queer lyric.
참고문헌 (22)
- Adorno, Theodor W., "Notes to Literature I", pp.37~54 (1991), Columbia UP
- Bruhm, Steven, "Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion", pp.429~447 (1998), Duke UP
- Butler, Judith, "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1999), Routledge
- Byron, George Gordon, "Byron’s Poetry and Prose" (2010), Norton
- Byron, George Gordon, "Byron’s Poetry and Prose", pp.241~245
- Byron, George Gordon, "Byron’s Poetry and Prose", pp.247~283
- Byron, George Gordon, "Byron’s Poetry and Prose", pp.98~99
- Crompton, Louis, "Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England" (1998), Gay Man’s P
- Culler, Jonathan, "Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism", pp.38~54 (1985), Cornell UP
- Culler, Jonathan, "The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction" (1981), Cornell UP
- de Man, Paul, "Autobiography as De-facement", MLN, 94(5), pp.919~930 (1979)
- Elfenbein, Andrew, "Byron and the Victorians" (1995), Cambridge UP
- Freud, Sigmund, "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14", pp.243~258 (1971), Hogarth
- Glass, Loren, "Blood and Affection: The Poetics of Incest in Manfred and Parisina", Studies in Romanticism, 34(2), pp.211~226 (1995)
- Kristeva, Julia, "Revolution in Poetic Language" (1984), Columbia UP
- Macdonald, D. L., "Incest, Narcissism and Demonality in Byron’s Manfred", Mosaic, 25(2), pp.25~38 (1992)
- Marchand, Leslie A, "Byron: A Portrait" (1970), U of Chicago P
- McGann, Jerome, "Byron and Romanticism" (2002), Cambridge UP
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, "Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire" (1985), Columbia UP
- Sha, Richard C., "Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832" (2009), Johns Hopkins UP
- Stansbury, Heather, "Bound by Blood: Incestuous Desire in the Works of Byron", The Byron Journal, 40(1), pp.17~28 (2012)
- Yingling, Thomas E., "The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology", pp.541~556 (2014), Johns Hopkins UP