Mediterranean Lyric

Abstract

This chapter brings together Mediterranean studies and poetics. At its heart, it asks a larger question—What is “Mediterranean literature”?—and advances the specific category of “Mediterranean lyric” through the examples of three poets from the contemporary francoarab Mediterranean world. The first section of the chapter builds on scholarship by Sharon Kinoshita in defining Mediterranean literature as multilingual, cross-linguistic, and connective, and it outlines some of the shortfalls of recent literary scholarship on the Mediterranean. Next, drawing on Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, it insists that literature should be “of the Mediterranean,” which designates the emergence of a different literary “contemporaneity” (following Giorgio Agamben): a literary aesthetics of persistent deferral (translation) and referral (intertextuality), of untimeliness and anachronism. The second section presents a critical digest of lyric theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and closes with a special consideration of French poetician Jean-Marie Gleize. The third and final section offers three readings of Mediterranean lyric: the translational rewriting by Habib Tengour of a foundational Arabic poetic genre; a decade-long project of composing sequences of textual poeticities by Emmanuel Hocquard that efface the lyric subject; and the surrealist poetics of invective political commitment in a chapbook by Serge Pey. Together, the cases presented outline a methodology for further inquiry into the region’s other languages. The conclusion suggests that Mediterranean lyric may hold the key to new and impossible poetic modes.