Call for Papers

The Silences of the Lyric

« The best communion men have is in silence »

Thoreau, Walden

Always already under threat, the voice is that object which, the moment it becomes manifest, reveals its problematic nature: it is a manifestation of corporeal presence as much as of a ghostly essence, its “vitality [proves to be] always already threatened by its disappearance,”[1]  phônế  (φωνή) constantly flirting dangerously with phonos (φόνος, meaning murder), bearing in itself the mark of transgression— literally meaning murder of meaning, but also self-effacement. The voice is therefore often understood within the paradigm of life and death. In Phaedrus, Plato notably opposes living speech to writing, which he places on the side of death. The voice thus constitutes an aporia, a paradox that the age of sound reproducibility has continually materialized and exacerbated the voice by transmitting it, alienating it, distancing it ever further from its source—not only in time, but also in space.

The lyric genre has always been in crisis, perpetually seeking definition, and the subject of debate since Plato and Aristotle.[2] Having emerged in modernity as a “representation of a feeling rather than as a feeling itself” (Jackson and Prins 12, our translation), lyricism later became the object of a theory of the “lyric” developed by the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In this work, Frye identifies the differentiating factor among the three genres, which he calls the “radical of presentation,” that is, the mode of performance—“the relation between the poet and his audience” (Frye 247, our translation). Consequently, for Frye, the “lyric” is a mode of enunciation that is not limited to emotion but constitutes an “internal mimesis of sounds and images” (250), which he famously defines as an “utterance that is overheard” (249). Although this conception was later questioned by scholars such as René Wellek in the late 1960s and Ralph Cohen in the 1980s, it remains compelling to problematize this definition of lyricism in the era of sound studies.

Today, our ways of reading and listening to works seem more problematic than ever. Silence appears constantly threatened by our hyperconnected mode of life, in which everything must always be said, expressed, and heard—where nothing must remain unsaid, where having “the last word” seems to prevail. Yet, poetry continually reveals the failure of such logorrhea, showing that “nothingness” is something that persists, that obstinately remains—and that, like silence, haunts both language and speech. As Proust once wrote, “the silence of the world allows us to see better, or to see otherwise.” Poetry thus emerges as a privileged space, a language of predilection for silence—silence as the very condition of meaning’s creation, enabling us to transform our perception of the world around us.

This issue therefore seeks to explore poetic expressions whose modes of writing or enunciation challenge the very notion of lyricism. While performance, its technical and logistical conditions, and numerous sound-archiving initiatives have been increasingly studied,[3] it also seems timely to question how the sonic, textual, visual, and typographic silences of certain poetic practices articulate a lyricism in which Mallarmé’s “elocutionary disappearance of the poet” resonates with an impossibility of both speech and reading.

We might think, for instance, of poets often deemed “unreadable,” in whose work the legible—or rather the illegible—flirts with the visible or even with asemia. Susan Howe’s visual poetry, for example, interrogates both reading and orality. Her collages and intertextual practice make the notion of lyricism problematic, particularly when we consider how stammering intrudes upon her poetry readings, or how David Grubbs’s “ambient soundings” have sonically rendered the intrinsic silence of her poetry. One might also recall John Cage’s silent lyricism, most famously his piece 4’33”. The American composer conceived of silence as “the multiplicity of activity which surrounds us constantly” (I Have Never Listened to Any Sound 216) and declared that “poetry is having nothing to say and saying it; we possess nothing” (M, Foreword).[4] The way his writing stages the transition “from language to music” on the page invites us to reflect upon how this transition operates in the suspended silence of scattered letters and mesostics in Empty Words—inviting us to think of writing as the process that binds music and silence, not only on the page but also through the letters themselves, which, though not mute, may seem to hold meaning back in the blackness of their ink.

Ecopoetics may also be explored, the way in which nature’s quiet lyricism exposes our own inability to listen—as in Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, in Jonathan Skinner’s poetic and editorial work, or in the poems of Jack Collom.

This symposium will examine how silence becomes a scriptible and active force in American poetry and lyric productions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine the various ways in which it shifts and transforms across time, literary forms, and media—embracing textual and visual expressions as well as performative modes that foreground the liminal nature of the lyric subject, whose embodied presence exists in a suspended space between voice and inscription, between orality and aurality.

Please send abstracts to Marie Olivier marie.olivier@u-pec.fr and Antoine Cazé antoine.caze@u-paris.fr by October 15, 2026.

We thank you in advance for your proposals and look forward to your contributions.

The symposium will take place in Parisfrom March 3 to 5, 2027.

Symposium organized with the support of

IMAGER – EA 3958, Université Paris-Est Créteil

et ECHELLES – UMR 8264, Université Paris-Cité

France

Selected bibliography

ALFANDARY, Isabelle. « Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it; we possess nothing » (John Cage), Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 103 (2005) : 104-116.

BALMÈS, François. Le nom, la loi, la voix. Paris : Erès, 1997.

BERTRAND, Jean-Pierre, Michel Delville et Christine Pagnoulle, eds. Le rossignol instrumental : poésie, musique, modernité. Paris : Vrin, 2004.

BLASING, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry, The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

BLOCH, Béatrice, Apostolos LAMPROPOULOS et Pierre Garcia. Écriture picturale, écriture musicale de la littérature et des arts, Modernités 41. Pessac : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2017.

BONNET, Antoine et Frédéric Marteau, eds. Le choix d'un poème, la poésie saisie par la musique. Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015.

BROQUA, Vincent and Dirk Weissmann. Sound / Writing : traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens, Homophonic translation – traducson – Oberflächenübersetzun. Paris, Editions des archives contemporaines, 2019.

BROQUA, Vincent. « The Trampslator : Performing the translation of the sound of silence », English. Oxford University Press, 2021.

BROSSARD, Olivier. « Reading Music in Frank O’Hara’s poetry ». Letterature d’America 194 (2023): 21-58.

CASTARÈDE, Marie-France. La voix et ses sortilèges. Paris : Belles lettres, 1987.

CAVELL, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

CAZÉ, Antoine. "Les musiques savantes américaines : questions d’esthétique". RFEA 117 (2008).

CHRISTOFFEL, David. "Orphée dissipé, Poésie et Musique aux XXe et XXIe siècles", Revues des sciences humaines, 2018.

COSTELLO, Bonnie. The Plural Of Us, Poetry and Community in Auden and Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

CULLER, Jonathan. "Lyric, History, and Genre," New Literary History 40.4 (Autumn 2009): 879-99.

CULLER, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

DE MAN, Paul. "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 239-62.

DELVILLE Michel et Christine Pagnoulle, eds. Sound as sense: contemporary US poetry and in music. Bruxelles : P.I.E.- P. Lang, 2003.

DESBLACHES, Claudia et Sylvie Bauer. Des voix acousmates en littérature. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021.

DINOUART, Abbé. L’art de se taire [1771]. Grenoble : Jérôme Millon, 2002.

DOLAR, Mladen. A Voice, And Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

DWORKIN, Craig. "Lyric and the Hazard of Music." The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and PMLA (May 2008).

EDWARDS, Michael, ed. Words/Music. Portree: Aquila, 1979.

ELIOT, T. S. "The Three Voices of Poetry," On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. 89-102.

GILBERT, Sandra. On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of Thinking about Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

HERTMANS, Stefan. Poétique du silence. Trans. Isabelle Rosselin. Paris : Arcades / Gallimard, 2022.

JACKSON, Virginia and Yopie Prins. “Lyrical Studies.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 521-30.

JACKSON, Virginia, eds. The Lyric Theory Reader, A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

JACKSON, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery, A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton University Press, 2005.

JAMAIN, Claude. Idée de la voix, études sur le lyrisme occidental. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004.

JAMESON, Fredric. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. 247-63.

JOHNSON W. R. The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

LACOUE-LABARTHE, Philippe. Pour n’en pas finir, écrits sur la musique. Paris : Christian  Bourgois, 2015.

LANG, Abigail. « De la poetry reading à la lecture publique ». Jean-François Puff ed. Dire la poésie, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2015.

MAULPOIX, Jean-Michel. La Voix d’Orphée, essai sur le lyrisme. Paris : Corti, 1989.

MELILLO, John. The poetics of noise from Dada to Punk. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

MINER, Earl. The Renewal of Song: Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice, ed. Earl Miner and Amiya Dev. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000.

OLIVIER Marie, ed. « La voix dans tous ses états », TIES 4 (2019). http://revueties.org/document/394-la-voix-dans-tous-ses-etats

OLIVIER, Marie, ed. « Car Poétique rime avec Musique », TIES 2 (2018). http://revueties.org/document/389-poetique-et-musique.

PARRET, Herman. La voix et son temps. Bruxelles : De Boeck & Larcier, 2002.

PERLOFF, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin, eds. The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

PERLOFF, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

PUFF, Jean-François, dir. Dire la poésie ? Nantes : Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2015.

POIZAT, Michel. L’Opéra ou le cri de l’ange. Paris : Métailié, 1986.

POIZAT, Michel. La voix sourde. Paris : Métailié, 1991.

POIZAT, Michel. Vox Populi, vox Dei. Paris : Métailié, 2001.

RABATÉ, Dominique, dir. Figures du sujet lyrique. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.

RABATÉ, Dominique, Joëlle Sermet et Yves Vadé, dirs. Le sujet lyrique en question, Modernités 8. Bordeaux : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996.

ROUGET, Gilbert. La musique et la danse. Paris : Gallimard, 1980.

RUTTER, Emily Ruth. The blues muse: race, gender, and musical celebrity in American poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama press, 2018.

SAMPSON, Fiona. Lyric cousins, Poetry and Musical form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

SPAHR, Juliana. Introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 1-17.

TUCKER, Herbert F. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

VASSE, Denis. L’ombilic et la voix. Paris : Seuil, 1972.

[1] Marie Olivier, «Introduction», TIES [En ligne], TIES, La voix dans tous ses états, mis à jour le 14/10/2019, URL : http://revueties.org/document/751-introduction.

[2] Since the “retrospective illusion” which Gérard Genette discussed in L’Architexte (1979) — namely, that the lyric genre was never presented by Plato or Aristotle as a “genre” in the same sense as the epic or the dramatic — lyric poetry has been a genre in search of itself.

[3] For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Vincent Broqua’s work on performance and Abigail Lang’s research on sound archives (see bibliography).

[4] We refer to Isabelle Alfandary’s work on John Cage (see bibliography).