Literary Theory and the Return of the Lyric

A long-standing disregard of the lyric by literary theory, the latter tackling the burning questions of politics and ethics in the 1990s and 2000s, has been explained away by lyric’s purported disinterestedness. But ever since literary theory has been battling the vacancy in its heart after every paradigm was discarded and replaced by competing “theoretical jetties” (Derrida), the lyric has regained prominence as a new promising ground for exercising literary theory again, without being suspected of a de Manian “return to philology.” Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015) and The Lyric Theory Reader (2014) by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prince have lately been the most discussed, offering divergent views on the lyric, be it in terms of the lyric subject or the status of the genre. If the question of the former was central to New Criticism, the latter has been re-engaged by a rather surprising audience, i.e. philosophers. In this chapter, the author’s aim is to investigate how and why the desire of philosophers for the lyric, in writings by Derrida, Agamben, and Badiou, to name but a few, has become the epitome of literary theory’s return to literature.