Lyric Poetry as a Narrative Speech Genre: On the dialogue between genre theory and cognitive science (original) (raw)

2016, Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN). № 7-8 Autumn 2012 / 2014.

This study reconsiders the standard generic opposition between narrative and non-narrative poetry. Genre is conceived, in line with recent Russian scholarship, in analogy with the gene in biology, so that no matter what transformations and dislocations traditional genres might undergo over time, their structures, like organisms, do not fundamentally change but only mutate. What sets poetry off from prose is that the structures of the former are “noticeably measured and rhythmical.” Yet, poetry’s “fine-textured counterpoint of verse, syntax and narrative,” which takes the form of segmentivity, gapping and measurement/ countermeasurement at various textual levels (McHale), carries over, in Comuzzi’s proposal, to prose. Narrative texts, she argues, construct metric patterns and countermeasurements to these patterns through the various planes of point of view inscribed in the supra-phrasal units of narrative composition identified by Boris Uspenskij. Comuzzi completes her contribution to transgeneric narratology with a penetrating analysis of a corpus of lyric poems in which narrative scenarios, however discreet, are indissociable from the counterpoint of meter and rhythm. (From John Pier's Forword to the Journal issue)