Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book by Olivia Holmes (review)

REVIEWS 203 wrote for the theater and cinema between 1945–2000 also incorporated themes of liberation into their work. While Franca Rame, Lina Wertmüller, and Natalia Ginzburg may be some of the better known writers of performance genres, other significant writers such as Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Liliana Cavani, and Francesca Archibugi sought to move outside patriarchal boundaries as well. Áine O’Healy’s chapter draws attention to the theatrical and cinematic pursuits of lesser known women writers. Sharon Wood’s section on Aesthetics and Critical Theory highlights the women critics who deconstructed traditional patriarchal discourses in order to examine women’s relationship to language and culture. Prominent figures in this dialogue are Adriana Cavarero, Carla Lonzi, Elisabetta Rasy, and Luisa Muraro. Given that these women have received little, if any, attention outside Italian feminist circles, Wood’s chapter has nicely included their voices into the history of contemporary critical theory. While the “Bibliographical guide to women writers and their work,” coordinated by Penny Morris, is by no means complete, it offers a concise overview of the major works and selected criticism of the women writers mentioned throughout the history. A History of Women’s Writing in Italy is a comprehensive guide to the literary activity of women from the Renaissance to the present. Not only is this text a valuable contribution to the study of women’s history but an indispensable introduction to the literary voices of women in Italian history. LISA MORA, Comparative Literature, UCLA Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000) ix + 245 pp. There are many things to commend in Olivia Holmes’s Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book. First and foremost Holmes does not engage in the trite word play (authority, author, auctoritas ) so often associated with this topic, and the bibliography is rich in both primary and secondary sources. Holmes is expert in the various poetic forms of lyric poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and clearly has command of a variety of languages (it appears that most of the translations are her own). Additionally, the extent of her research experience is evidenced by her references to variations in manuscripts and sources, the differences in scribal hands, and other details that speak directly to her familiarity not just with the poems contained in the manuscripts but with the very substance of the manuscripts themselves. This last point is of special significance because the existence of manuscripts as such plays a key role in Holmes’s argument. She explains her project as a consideration of “the emergence of an author who was necessarily an ‘implied author,’ an aggregate of inferences based on the text, primarily on the use of the first person. In separating the speaker from the spoken, the written text inevitably created a fictional narrator, the real author’s alter ego, who was able to lead an existence more independent from its creator or performer than it had in the performance situation” (4). I quote at length here because a project presented in these terms requires a certain amount of “unpacking” in order to clarify the project’s actual aims which then makes it possible to determine whether or not the stated objectives are met. For example, what is an “implied author”? The use of this phrase in REVIEWS 204 quotation marks suggests that the reader should be familiar with that thing that is called “implied author” while Holmes’s definition of the term, “an aggregate of inferences based on the text” immediately contradicts such a reading by providing the information we should, apparently, already have. More important , however, the concept of an “implied author” is only familiar here in so far as it conflates ideas from different critical contexts—Wolfgang Iser’s “implied reader” and Foucault’s “author-function”—creating a third concept which appears familiar but, in fact, remains fairly ambiguous. The implicit gesture to Foucault is further complicated by Holmes’s repeated attempts to determine a given poet’s intentions or a given lyric sequence’s relationship to a poet’s biography when both of these reconstructions work directly...