What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan ...Culler reveals the limitations of these two models--the Romantic and the modern--and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.
This contribution examines the question of how contemporary lyric poetry expands upon established generic concepts by considering the work of Monika Rinck, one of the most striking voices among a ...generation of exceedingly talented poets who made their debut in the 2000s. In her poetry, we find numerous examples of how the expectations of lyric are deliberately undermined: among them, formal features reminiscent of prose, such as her tendency to use extremely long lines and prose-typical abbreviations, as well as her explicit interest in the discursive exploration of ‘concepts.’ As her essays suggest, this interest manifests itself most readily in Rinck’s efforts to avoid the totalizing economization of society (as well as art and language) and has, as a result, motivated the development of her own style within experimental language poetry. However, while Rinck has played a leading role in expanding the contemporary concept of poetry, the poetic principles to which she refers in her theoretical writings and poems are by no means new. In this article, her poem „Augenfühlerfisch“ (“eye-tentacle fish”) serves not only to illustrate her tendency to expand poetry into discursive prose but demonstrates how it is rooted in a long-standing philosophical tradition. The terminology used in the poem can be traced back to early modern epistemology and particularly to the foundation of scientific aesthetics by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In referring to Baumgarten’s definition of poetry as “fully sensuous speech vollkommen sinnliche Rede” (as well as the specific deployment of this definition by Johann Adolf Schlegel), it becomes clear that Rinck reactivates an epistemological potential in lyric that had been hidden by the paradigm of Erlebnislyrik experiential lyric. Moreover, Rinck is able to relax the Erlebnislyrik’s pretense to sincerity in part thanks to the same prose features, such as the multiplication of voices, already mentioned above.
This study offers a fresh approach to the theory and practice of poetry criticism from a narratological perspective. Arguing that lyric poems share basic constituents with narrative fiction, the ...authors utilize the advanced techniques of narratology to invigorate the field of poetic theory and methodology while demonstrating the fruitfulness of this approach by detailed analyses of canonical English poems.
The second volume in this series presents the reader with an extensive study of some major genres of Persian poetry from the first centuries after the rise of Islam to the end of the Timurid era and ...the inauguration of Safavid rule in the beginning of the sixteenth century. The authors explore the development of poetic genres, from the panegyric (qaside), to short lyrical poems (ghazal), and the quatrains (roba'i), tracing the stylistic evolution of Persian poetry up to 1500 and examine the vital role of these poetic forms within the rich landscape of Persian literature.
Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how ...Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relation to the drama of position played out between poet, poem, and reader, the author produces a fresh interpretation of almost all of Catullus's oeuvre. Running through the book is an analysis of the ideological stakes behind the construction of the author Catullus in twentieth-century scholarship and of the agenda governing the interpreter's position in relation to Catullus.
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