Lyric is, in terms of length, the smallest of the major literary genres. Its component part, the stanza, is likened to a room that encloses. As recent scholarship has shown, lyric poetry also tends to be imagined as cloistered—as separate from politics and from the social.

In this course, we will read key texts in lyric theory, seeking to understand how this genre has been understood in history and in the present. We will focus on a series of tropes said to define lyric: confession, overheard speech, address to an absent figure, among others.

We will study the appearance of these tropes in lyric poems, examining how theories of lyric intersect with and illuminate avowedly "political" subjects, including surveillance, incarceration, forced disappearance, and so on. We will also examine sequence of texts that "uncontain" lyric, combining it with land art in order to literalize or concretize some of the genre's central tropes.

Key theorists may include: John Stuart Mill, Theodor Adorno, Gérard Genette, Barbara Johnson, Jonathan Culler, and Fred Moten. Key poets/artists may include: Ovid, Raúl Zurita, and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe).