The Lyric Essay : A Question of Gender ? The Glass Essay by Anne Carson and Citizen by Claudia Rankine
The aim of this paper is to compare the texts of Anne Carson (The Glass Essay, 1995) and Claudia Rankine (Citizen. An American Lyric, 2014) in order to demonstrate that, on the one hand, the hybrid character of what Anglo-Saxon critics now call the “lyric essay” allows to denounce the porousness of the borders that separate literary discourse from scientific one, and, on the other hand, that such a denunciation is not yet sufficient to reconfigure these same borders. In particular, we will seek at showing that, if the two works manifest a “critical” attitude towards lyric as a genre, they nevertheless rely on the alliance between the individual dimension of experience and the universal scope of linguistic expression that, at least since Romanticism, is peculiar to it.