Theories of Lyric [Abstract]

Claudia Hillebrandt, Sonja Klimek, Ralph Müller, William Waters, Rüdiger Zymner

Theories of Lyric

(Abstract)

Full-length article in: JLT 11/1 (2017), 1–11.

The general theory of lyric is a developing field of study. Approaches to lyric are, however, reputedly stuck in »the impasse of an impressionistic and narrowly formalistic critical debate on the genre« (Müller-Zettelmann/Rubik 2005, 8). Such claims may be paired with a call for raising the theory of lyric to higher levels (cf. Culler 2015, 2sq.; Zymner 2009, 8sq.; Gibson 2015, 1sq.), including the proposal of formulating, in analogy to the well-established field of narratology, a formal ›lyricology‹ (»lyricologie« or »Lyrikologie«, as it is called in French and German respectively; cf. Zymner 2009, 7–9; Rodriguez 2009; von Ammon 2015). More particularly, it has been suggested that parts of lyric theory should be reconceptualized with the help of narrative theories (cf. Müller-Zettelmann 2000, Müller-Zettelmann/Rubik 2005).

However, the influx of concepts from different theories into the analysis of lyric entails some problems. It appears that the practices of analyzing lyric have become heavily influenced by generic models and approaches drawn from the theories of drama and narrative (for critique, cf. Culler 2015,108–112; Hempfer 2014,16–21). There are various issues here; for instance, one may ask whether the lyric concepts of voice or persona can be grasped in terms of fictional characters or narrators, or whether lyric typically develops structures that are similar to narrative discours and story. More importantly, narratological approaches tend to see lyric as a defective or residual form of the narrative mode (cf. Hempfer 2014, 19–21; Hillebrandt 2015).

Various theoretical issues in the theory of lyric have been taken up with renewed vigor in the last years, including several proposals with respect to the definition of the genre (for proposals, cf. Zymner 2009; Hempfer 2014; Prinz/Mandelbaum 2015), its function (cf. Rodriguez 2003; Zymner 2013; Lamarque 2015), and the modelling of the voice (cf. Rabaté 2013) and address (cf. Waters 2003; Culler 2015); other work has questioned the status of lyric altogether (cf. Jackson/Prins 2014).

Recent theoretical proposals do not focus on the catalogue of descriptive terminology (verse, metre etc.), but put particular emphasis on the most basic features and constituents of lyric. This growing scholarly engagement with lyric on a theoretical level raises the issue of defining the macro-genre and its ways of constructing text worlds with respect to the poem’s speaker and addressee. In this volume established and upcoming theorists of lyric have been asked to outline their theoretical positions with respect to the following questions: What is the relationship between signs, words and world(s) in lyric or poetry? Does a poem’s way of signifying constitute a particular way of creating textual worlds, and how can we describe these worlds? How do authors and readers deal with these worlds? These questions have been addressed by various critics in different traditions of scholarship; however, most studies seem to concentrate on the discourses in their own languages, only occasionally taking note of what has been done in other traditions of literary criticism. This is the main impetus of gathering scholars from different traditions (»national« traditions, for want of a better word) of scholarly engagement with the theory of the lyric. As a consequence, these statements are not entirely new contributions, but present rather an argumentative overview of work that has been done in the past, by outlining possibly divergent opinions about unsolved issues that continue to influence the debate. In the remainder of this introduction, we will address only four issues that are of immediate relevance to this special volume.

References

Anderegg, Johannes, Das Gedicht [1984], in: Ludwig Völker (ed.), Lyriktheorie. Texte vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart 2000, 429–436.

Borkowski, Jan/Simone Winko, Wer spricht das Gedicht? Noch einmal zum Begriff ›lyrisches Ich‹ und zu seinen Ersetzungsvorschlägen, in: Hartmut Bleumer/Caroline Emmelius (ed.), Lyrische Narrationen – narrative Lyrik. Gattungsinterferenzen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Berlin/New York 2011, 43–77.

Burdorf, Dieter, Einführung in die Gedichtanalyse [1995], Stuttgart ³2015.

Culler, Jonathan, Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge, MA 2015.

Eagleton, Terry, How to Read a Poem, Oxford 2007.

Fricke, Harald/Peter Stocker, Lyrisches Ich, in: H.F. et al. (ed.), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, Vol. 2, Berlin/New York 2000, 509–511.

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays [1957], Princeton, NJ ¹⁰1971.

Gavins, Joanna, Text World Theory, Edinburgh 2007.

Genette, Gérard, Introduction à l’architexte, Paris 1979.

Gibson, John (ed.), The Philosophy of Poetry, Oxford 2015.

Hamburger, Käte, Die Logik der Dichtung [1957], Stuttgart ²1968.

Hempfer, Klaus W., Lyrik. Skizze einer systematischen Theorie, Stuttgart 2014.

Hillebrandt, Claudia, Author and Narrator in Lyric Poetry, in: Dorothee Birke/Tilmann Köppe (ed.), Author and Narrator, Berlin/Boston 2015, 213–233.

Hühn, Peter/Jörg Schönert, Einleitung. Theorie und Methodologie narratologischer Lyrik-Analyse, in: P.H./J.S. (ed.), Lyrik und Narratologie. Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin/New York 2007, 1–18.

Huss, Bernhard/Florian Mehltretter/Gerhard Regn (ed.), Lyriktheorie(n) der italienischen Renaissance, Berlin 2012.

Jackson, Virginia, Lyric, in: Roland Greene et al. (ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1974], Princeton/Oxford ⁴2012, 826–834.

Jackson, Virginia/Yopie Prins, General Introduction, in: V.J./Y.P. (ed.), The Lyric Theory Reader. A Critical Introduction, Baltimore 2014, 1–8.

Klimek, Sonja, »I grieve« as make-believe. Generating fictional truth in 18^th century lamentation poetry (Günther, Haller, Young and Novalis), in: J. Alexander Bareis/Lene Nordrum (ed.), How to Make Believe. The Fictional Truth in the Representational Arts, Berlin/Boston 2015, 223–242.

Klimek, Sonja, Textwelten der Lyrik – Spielräume der Interpretation. Am Beispiel von Goethes »Dem aufgehenden Vollmonde«, in: Elisabeth Heyne/Julia Dettke (ed.), Spielräume und Raumspiele in der Literatur, Würzburg 2016, 85–103.

Lamarque, Peter, Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value, in: John Gibson (ed.), The Philosophy of Poetry, Oxford 2015, 18–36.

Lamping, Dieter, Das lyrische Gedicht. Definitionen zu Theorie und Geschichte der Gattung [1989], Göttingen ²2000.

Müller-Zettelmann, Eva, Lyrik und Metalyrik. Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachigen Dichtung, Heidelberg 2000.

Müller-Zettelmann, Eva/Margarete Rubik (ed.), Theory into Poetry. New Approaches to the Lyric, Amsterdam/New York 2005.

Müller-Zettelmann, Eva/Margarete Rubik, Introduction, in: E.M.-Z./M.R. (ed.), Theory into Poetry. New Approaches to the Lyric, Amsterdam/New York 2005, 7–17.

Prinz, Jesse/Eric Mandelbaum, Poetic Opacity. How to Paint Things with Words, in: John Gibson (ed.), The Philosophy of Poetry, Oxford 2015, 63–87.

Rabaté, Dominique, Gestes lyriques, Paris 2013.

Rodriguez, Antonio, Le pacte lyrique. Configuration discursive et interaction affective, Sprimont 2003.

Rodriguez, Antonio, L’épisode émotionnel en poésie lyrique: toute progression affective n’est pas une narration, Vox poetica, 2009, http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/pas/rodriguez2009.html (02.01.2017).

Semino, Elena, Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts, London/New York 1997.

Spinner, Kaspar, Zur Struktur des lyrischen Ich, Frankfurt a.M. 1975.

Spoerhase, Carlos, Die lyrische Apostrophe als triadisches Kommunikationsmodell. Am Beispiel von Klopstocks Ode »Von der Fahrt auf der Zürcher-See«, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 87 (2013), 147–185.

Staiger, Emil, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, Zürich 1946.

Vendler, Helen, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge, MA 1995.

Von Ammon, Frieder, Lyrikologie, in: Rüdiger Zymner (ed.), Handbuch Literarische Rhetorik, Berlin/New York 2015, 221–242.

Waters, William, Poetry’s Touch. On Lyric Address, Ithaca, NY 2003.

Wolf, Werner, The Lyric. Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation, in: Eva Müller-Zettelmann/Margarete Rubik (ed.), Theory into Poetry. New Approaches to the Lyric, Amsterdam/New York 2005, 21–56.

Zipfel, Frank, Lyrik und Fiktion, in: Dieter Lamping (ed.), Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte, Stuttgart/Weimar 2011, 162–166.

Zymner, Rüdiger, Lyrik. Umriss und Begriff, Paderborn 2009.

Zymner, Rüdiger, Funktionen der Lyrik, Münster 2013.

Zymner, Rüdiger, Evolutionäre Psychologie der Fiktionalität, in: Tobias Klauk/Tilmann Köppe (ed.), Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Berlin/Boston 2014, 277–329.

2017-03-16

JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990

Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved.
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and JLTonline.
For other permission, please contact JLTonline.

How to cite this item:

Abstract of:Claudia Hillebrandt, Sonja Klimek, Ralph Müller, William Waters, Rüdiger Zymner, Theories of Lyric.

In: JLTonline (16.03.2017)

URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/889/2059

A Persistent Identifier can be found in the PDF-Version of this article.