A Cognitive - Literary – Studies Approach to Contemporary Poetry (eBook)

Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Leipzig (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Lyric theory polarises the narratological complexities of the text on the one hand and the epideictic echo into the empirical reality on the other. Through this divergence, the transformative urge expressed in the poems is circumvented. The description of the transformative function of poetry, which consists of the fusion of enounced and enunciation, demands and enables the convergence of the epideictic quality of the lyric and the narratological mechanisation of poetry. The crucial link for the convergence of lyric theoretical discourses is the framework of cognitive schemata. This cognitive approach identifies the text, language, and world knowledge by scrutinising the schemata and frames of a poem. The approach transforms the strands of lyric theory to focus on the modulating capacity of a poem by engaging the reader’s cognitive process and thus articulating the transformative function of the text for that reader. Catalysing the narratological and epideictic theories of the lyric with the cognitive – literary – studies approach enables a framework that distinguishes a fragmentary and heuristic construction, classifies the modulation kinds of accretion, tuning or restructuring and therewith articulates the transformative function of early 21st century crisis poetry.

The paper begins with section 2. Lyric Theory, which links the theories of poetry to the cognitive approach and creates a corpus of early 21st poetry that illustrates the suitability of this analysis. Subsequently, the cognitive method is discussed in more detail in section 3. Transformative Function Methodology. The main section 4. Schema and Frame analysis of Contemporary Crisis Poetry focuses on the application of the theory to model examples and presents the results of the cognitive method for the corpus of early 21st century crisis poetry. Finally, section 5. Conclusion provides a summary and discusses limitations and prospects.