Kershner, Stephen M. Review of Jacob Blevins, ed. DIALOGISM AND LYRIC SELF-FASHIONING. BMCR (June 2009).

Blevins, Jacob, ed. Dialogism and Lyric Self-fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP, 2008. Adequately defining lyric subjectivity and lyric consciousness has always been a thorny task, particularly because of the diversity of themes, forms, and eras that help constitute lyric poetry. The volume under review, Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre, edited by Jacob Blevins, makes a valuable and rather stimulating contribution to the ever-larger body of scholarship on lyric as a genre, attempting to describe more clearly certain characteristics of lyric subjectivity and make progress in correcting certain scholarly misunderstandings about lyric's dynamic and complex nature. Blevins and the contributors take as their starting point the agreeable position that lyric poetry generally manifests its subjectivity through the use of multiple voices and discourses, in opposition to the sometimes-held belief that lyric is exclusively personal or meditative poetry--that is, an expression that inherently lacks any kind of social or ideological engagement, a kind of confessional performance. In making this claim, Blevins and the contributors turn to Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism as a way to reveal the "multi-voiced" discourse found in lyric poetry, particularly those voices that compete for primacy and/or ideological control within their respective poem(s). In using Bakhtin's dialogism as a theoretical platform, Blevins and the volume's contributors are able to demonstrate the complex relational aspect found in lyric discourse because of its status as born from, positioned between, or in response to the voices (both heard and unheard) of others. The papers in this volume consequently suggest ways of reading the strategies that lyric poets use to adapt and attune both their voice(s) and their poetry to specific social and ideological contexts. In the end, this volume is decidedly successful in its goal of constructing a "transhistorical survey of dialogism and the lyric genre"(17). Some readers might find the use of Bakhtin's dialogic model, originally formulated for use with the novel, a bit surprising since Bakhtin famously regarded poetry (lyric and epic) to be essentially monologic. Yet, as Blevins and the contributors continually display throughout the volume, Bakhtin's assessment of lyric poetry is far too narrow and theoretically limiting to sufficiently describe its examples (variously referring to Bakhtin's theory as "disregarding," "miscalculating," "misunderstanding," or "vastly underestimating" lyric poetry). Recent scholarship on lyric subjectivity has indeed begun to move away from the constrictive conception of lyric as monologic and, thus, the use of dialogism here is quite natural. In the process of demonstrating the multi-discursive nature of lyric, Blevins and the contributors are also able to develop further and extend some of Bakhtin's ideas for use outside the novel, a benefit that will continue to yield results. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/06/20090657.html.