The I and the Others. Articulations of Personality and Communication Structures in the Lyric

Abstract

The paper discusses articulations of personality and communication structures in the lyric: who is speaking in a poem? What is the status of the person who speaks, or the one who is spoken about? Is it the author himself who is speaking, or is it someone else – an autonomous being, completely different and detached from the subject developed in the text? Who is addressed in and by a poem? It is made clear that conventional concepts of

The open subject and translations from nature: Answers to the Anthropocene in contemporary poetry (Gennadij Ajgi, Les Murray, Christian Lehnert)

“…There is no narrative framing to mark the direct speech of the natural phenomena. The headings of the poems, the sections or the book, as well as its dedication ‘to the glory of God’ are the sole elements pointing towards subjects beyond the natural phenomena: to an overarching ‘textual subject’ (Burdorf, 2017) responsible for the composition of the whole poem and the writer himself. While both other parts of the book include a speaker of the poems that suggests autobiographical references, the second section of the cycle includes animals and plants, even landscapes and a DNA-cell as speakers of the poems.…”

“…A sob drawn out into years?’ (Lehnert, 2018: 95). The reproduction of the tree’s speech presupposes an auratic relationship in which the trees express themselves through the thoughts and feelings of the text’s poetic subject (which is not to be identified with the speaker – in this case, the trees themselves; Burdorf coined the term ‘textual subject’ for such occasions; Burdorf, 2017).…”