Plotting the lyric: forms of narration in poetry

Abstract

This article is based on the assumption that lyric poems generally share the fundamental constituents of story and discourse as well as the narrative act with narrative fiction in that they likewise feature a sequence of incidents (usually of a mental kind), mediate and shape it from a specific perspective and present it from a particular point of time vis-à-vis the sequence of incidents. A general outline of the narratological categories which may be applied to poetry analysis is given using William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an illustrative example. The aim of the article is heuristic: the intention is not to blur the distinction between fiction and poetry and treat poems indiscriminately as narrative texts, but rather identify and highlight the specifically poetic forms and functions which instances of narrating adopt in poems. The main section of the article will then focus on the first of the three aspects mentioned, the modelling of poetic sequentiality, i.e. the specification of types of plot, plotting and presentation of plot in poetry and the analysis of their functions

Functions of figurativity for the narrative in lyric poetry – with a study of English and German poetic epitaphs from the 17th century

“…In the collection Theory into Poetry , edited by Müller-Zettelmann and Rubik (2005: 97–249), one of four sections is devoted to the transfer of narratological theories to lyric poetry. This popularisation of the topic owes a lot to the various publications in the context of project 6 (‘Towards a Theory and Methodology of Narratological Analysis of Poetry’) at the International Centre for Narratology (ICN) at Hamburg University (see Hühn, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2011; Hühn and Kiefer, 2005; Hühn and Schönert, 2002, 2007; Hühn and Sommer, 2009; Schönert et al, 2007), where poetry analysis was combined with insights from ‘new narratology’ (based on cognitive psychology and linguistics), including also classical narratological Genettian terminology.…”

Linking Emotions to Surroundings: A Stylistic Model of Pathetic Fallacy

“…The emotions and animated entity in question can be featured implicitly or explicitly in the text . Three criteria must be present for this definition to be fulfilled: firstly, an animated entity (implicit or explicit) must be present, meaning human characters, implied authors, narrators or speakers (Eckardt, 2015: 167–168; Hühn, 2005: 152; Palmer, 2004: 16–17; Prince, 1987: 42–43), or anthropomorphised animals, which can be accounted by this criterion as long as they show signs of emotion (for instance, anthropomorphised rabbits in Adams’s Watership Down ). Secondly, surroundings must be present and described richly enough for readers to perceive where the scene takes place (i.e.…”

On the Essayistic Narration in The Dream of the Rood

“…The perception and cognition of poetic narration being highlighted in the process of poetic reading in spite of the generic separation between novel and poetry [7] (P. Hühn, p17), poetic construction and poetic production, scholars tends to have an increasing knowledge of the internal narrative mechanism and the componential rules of poetic narrative texts apart from the essayistic mechanism and componential rules of them without knowing that the overall understanding of those essayistic qualities of poetic narrative texts is likely to contribute to the epistemological progress of essayistic narration of those texts and to the poetic revolutions which have been playing an important role in helping poets to remove the language barriers, emotional barriers, aesthetic barrier, psychological barriers and ideological barriers on their roads to the fluent, eloquent and elegant articulation of their poetic thoughts, the correspondent representation of their poetic realities in consistence with the poetic images they have been picturing in their poetic production, the illuminative highlights of their poetic themes in the thematic construction of their poetic texts and the trans-disciplinary developments of their poetic thinking.…”