Re[a]ding and Ignorance: Poetic Constraints of Lyric.

Abstract

As an exercise in comparative poetics, this dissertation brings together lyrics in various media and language traditions (Greek, Latin, English, and Japanese) in an effort to refigure lyric reading practices. I argue that the interpretation of lyric involves simultaneous acts of reading and writing and redefine the practice of reproducing the text of an interpreted work within the interpretation itself as reding, from an archaic spelling of the verb read, i.e. rede.

The first chapter defines what reding is, namely the recomposing of a text within criticism, and uses Heidegger’s “A Dialogue of Language” to demonstrate that reding involves an act of willful ignorance, where the reder uncovers something new in a text by completely ignoring problems of accuracy. In the second, I examine how Anne Carson’s multiple translations in If not, winter; Eros the bittersweet; and other texts serve at once to dis- and re-integrate the fragments of Sappho. In chapter three, I use Tawara Machi’s translation into contemporary Japanese of Yosano Akiko’s Midaregami to reconfigure reding itself in an etymological analysis of the Japanese verb yomu (at once “to read” and “to compose”). Chapter four tries to understand how redings have become almost seamlessly inscribed in the Latin text of Catullus and to make sense of his textual silences. Chapter five returns to Yosano Akiko to see how when a poet abandons any specific responsibility for or to her text that both she and her reader/reder are freed from the trap it can become. The final chapter is a coda in which Shiina Ringo’s various lyric media are used to show that while reding carries with it the possibility of a greater poetics of interpretation, it also bears the risk of being rede in kind.

This dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of reading practices in the critical reception of poetry, to comparative poetics, and to lyric theory by using philological methods to bring popular song back into discussion with lyric poetry, particularly in using its intrinsically multimedial nature to reflect not only on song itself but on lyric as a whole and the problems of subjectivity therein.