Still Life with My Grandmother’s China: Mark Doty and the Lyric Essay

Abstract

Highlighting the ways in which Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon provides an important example of experimental narrative structure for literary theorists and critics, Smorul offers her own history with and model of the lyric essay. The meandering narrative includes art criticism, literary criticism, philosophical musings, and autobiographical vignettes, which woven together seem to produce a lush and haunting reflection on intimacy and materialism, love and death. The traditional abstract included here is merely a content teaser and, we hope, reads ironically against the innovative critical work that follows. If you wish to read more about the process by which this author undertook writing this essay, as well as the critical stakes of its production, please see the introduction to the volume as well as the accompanying anti-abstract at the close of the chapter.