2 Replies to “Lyric Poetry as a Narrative Speech Genre”

  1. Ludmila Comuzzi summarizes previous work and writes:

    The aim of narrativity is to tell “that something happened” while that of lyricality is to tell “that something is” and “what the lyrical teller thought about something” (Phelan 2007: 22; qtd. in McHale 2009: 12).

    McHale, Brian (2009). “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.” Narrative 17.1: 11-27

    Phelan, James (2007). Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

    This summary (and Comuzzi’s drawing on the analogy between genre and gene) impels me to suggest that the question of genres could be approached by a triplet: narrativity, narration, narrative. Narrativity is a potential — the future-oriented possibility of reading sequences off any semiotic object (literary or not) and said sequences can be narrated. Narration is a recounting of a sequence or sequences (whether compete or not). Narrative is the product of an act of narration. In this tripartite model, “what happened” and “what is” are not opposed.

    http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S6.HTM — explores further how embracing an adequate level of abstraction leads to a model where narrativity is manipulated in acts of “storing” and “sorting”. And I would, at this late date, add “shuffling”. I took as a model the computing machine but equally valid would be the possibility of gene splicing in Comuzzi’s suggestive analogy between genre and gene. The gene-genre is a mechanism for storing cultural memory, sorting memory strands and mixing.

  2. Narrativity would seem to have a wider field of application than either narrative or narration, so that we often speak of the narrative dimension (or narrrativity) of something that is “not a narrative” or even “not narrated” in the ordinary sense of the term.

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