Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona
Authors: Müller Wolfgang G. 
Published: March 2024

The present article discusses, in a first step, ground-breaking recent publications on the lyric subject, and dedicates itself, in a second step, to a new concept of lyric persona, which is devised to overcome the constrictions of the categories of subject and subjectivity and to open access of theory to all kinds and eras of lyric poetry from the Old English Seafarer to modern concrete poetry. The first book to be reviewed is Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht. Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute (2021), a collection of essays which pursues an argumentatively stimulating dialogical strategy. The articles begin with Wolf Schmid’s twenty theses on the abstract author, an appropriation of the narratological »implicit« author to the theory of lyric poetry. This statement is followed by a number of articles which alternatingly argue in favour of and against the concept of the abstract author. Peter Hühn, for instance, believes the term to be analytically especially fruitful, while Ralph Müller speaks of it as a »narratological spectre«. It is significant that, using Schmid’s term, Rainer Grübel analyzes a number of intriguing modern Russian poems, which he calls hybrid, since he identifies transitions from poetic to quasi reality-related passages and diagnoses concomitant stylistic changes in the texts. The international perspective is then widened by a comprehensive investigation of Russian, German and English terminological traditions. Marion Rutz demonstrates that handbooks and textbooks are by far not compatible. Among other terms she deals with the controversial German term »das lyrische Ich« (the lyric I). An investigation of the use of this term is then afforded by Hermann Korte’s examination of the poetry and poetics of Gottfried Benn, Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein. Subsequently, a group of articles deals with the fate of the subject in recent and current German poetry. Analyzing poems by Sabine Scho, Anne Cotton and Thomas Kling, Friederike Reents verifies, instead of »subject fatigue«, new possibilities of the subject. Analogous insights are gained by Mirjam Springer in her investigation of the lyric portrait and in a politically tempered article by Peter Geist, which discovers examples of varying degrees of imaginative self-construction going together with increasing author-relatedness. The volume concludes with a large-scale philosophically oriented article by Henrieke Stahl which constructs the model of a polymorphous subject based on Heinrich Barth’s existential variant of transcendental philosophy.

The second publication to be discussed is Varja Balžalorsky Antić’s monograph The Lyric Subject. A Reconceptualization (2022), which, though treating roughly the same subject as Autor und Subjekt, is oriented a totally different way. Like the one year previously published work, Antić proceeds from the awareness that the numerous new developments of poetry call for a reconceptualization of the genre and especially of the concept of the subject. In order to clarify the relation between the subject of language and the subject of poetry, she makes wide-ranging excursions into philosophy and discourse theory, which have not been undertaken in that way by other researchers in the field. Antić’s treatment of the prehistory of the concept of subjectivity is comprehensive. She erects her edifice of ideas on the basis of the theories of Émile Benveniste, Henri Meschonnic and others. Also, she goes back to Germanophone philosophers and theorists like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In particular, she emphasizes the development of Benveniste’s linguistics of enunciation to Meschonnic’s poetics of enunciation, according to which subjectivity does not reside in the lyric persona, but in the »the transsubject, the I-you of enunciation expanded onto all discourse«. In this context Meschonnic’s rhythm theory, which has profound ethical implications, is of central importance. Literary works which she subjects to analysis are troubadour poetry, in which she identifies polyphony and internal dialogism and consequently subjectivization, Nerval’s sonnet »El Desdichado«, to which she applies Paul Ricœur’s dialectic of ipse and idem, and Henri Michaux’ long poem »La Ralentie«, in which she identifies »dispersed multiplicity« and simultaneously integrated totality. The last chapter »Recapitulation and Systematization of Subject Configuration« has deserved special attention.

Inspired by a short article, »Persona. Its Meaning and Significance«, by James Dowthwaite (2023), the present author elaborates the concept of the lyric persona in the last part of the contribution. The creative capacity of persona is seen to occupy the free space between the empiric author and the finished product. The independence of the persona from the author has a liberating quality, which allows the author a fictional space and a range of possible expressions. The lyric persona can be called the aesthetic and cognitive laboratory between author and poem, which is responsible for the invention of speakers, the use of pronouns and all the formal and aesthetic elements represented in the poem. One advantage of the persona concept is that it has a liberating effect in regard to the overuse of the subject concept, though forms of I-saying are within the reach of the persona. Another advantage is the scope of the term persona. It can be applied from the Old English »Seafarer« to modern concrete poems like Edwin Morgan’s »Pomander«.