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

Abstract

Lyric poetry is a genre where discourse types such as description, argumentation, contemplation and narrative can occur together, though in varying combinations. During the last two decades, research has been devoted to the question of how to describe and to study such use of narrativity in lyric poetry. As Hühn (2007) puts it, ‘poetry can profitably be analysed on the basis of narratological categories’. However, this article argues that such a narratological analysis can never replace the traditional lyric analysis. The aim of this article is to combine the means of classical lyric analysis and narratological toolboxes with those of the new rhetorical narratology, in order to explore the impact of figurativity (i.e. micro-narrative stylistic characteristics on the ‘discours level’ of the poem) on the ‘histoire level’ (or the level of the enounced, Müller-Zettelmann, 2002) and on the reader of the poetic text in question. As an example, I will study English and German poetic epitaphs from the 17th century, because this early sub-genre of lyric poetry provides enough distance from a restrictive mainstream-romantic understanding of poetry and, at the same time, shows a high degree of figurativity with complex functions. In these texts, figurative elements such as synecdoche and metonymy create ‘discourse events’ at the level of enunciation (with the ‘lyrical I’ as the agent of a decisive change in consciousness or attitudes), but in some cases figurative elements even create (decisive changes that ‘the reader is meant to perform’, Hühn, 2007) that steer the reader’s mental construction of the poem’s ‘story world’, as a key aspect of the text’s narrativity.