quiz

WRITE AN ESSAY FOLLOWING THE PROMPT BELOW

FINAL ESSAY PROMPT: Write 3,000 to 3,500 word (approx. 12-14 pages) essay on the poetic

style of either Amiri Baraka or Langston Hughes, taking into consideration the nine features

Werner Wolf outlines with regard to the lyric, as those features are summarized below and

elaborated in “The Lyric - an Elusive Genre Problems of Definition and a Proposal for

Reconceptualization.” (AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28.1 [2003], 59-91.) (A

pdf of Wolf’s essay is posted in the attachment.) Write about one or more of these features.

Please limit your examples to between one and three poems. An essay that focuses on a single

poem is preferred.

PROTOTYPICAL COMPONENTS OF THE LYRIC

By Werner Wolf

Dept. of English and General Literature, University of Graz/Austria

From: “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualization.” Eva Muller-

Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik, eds. Theory into Poetry: New Apporaches to the Lyric.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, 21-56: Excerpt from pgs. 38-39.

1) potential orality and performativity without dramatic role playing: in spite of the

existence of poems that presuppose a written form, the lyric – not least owing to the

importance of the acoustic reality of its signifiers – has retained more affinity to orality

and performativity than narrative fiction; as for a distinction of the lyric from drama as a

rivaling performative genre, the tendency of drama towards role- playing is so self-

evident that the lyric’s significantly lesser tendency in this direction, together with its at

least relatively prominent orality, yields a sufficient difference for maintaining this

feature as a prototypical trait of the lyric;

2) shortness: with a view to the majority of poems, this is an obvious prototypical trait;

3) general deviation from everyday language and discursive conventions resulting in

a maximal semanticization of all textual elements; again this trait appears to be self-

explanatory with reference to the majority of texts;

4) versification (acoustic or visual) and general foregrounding of the acoustic potentials

of language including rhyme (‘musicality’) as interrelated special cases

UCSB BLST 146 Spring 2021. Instructor: Geoffrey Jacques, Ph.D. FINAL ESSAY

PROMPTS. Page 2 of 3

of deviation; considering the majority of poems it would hardly be possible to deny that

this trait is in fact also widely typical of the lyric;

5) salient self-referentiality and self-reflexivity as another special case of deviation:

while self-referentiality may seem obvious enough as a prototypical trait of most poems,

self-reflexivity is perhaps not found in the majority of poems; however, the lyric appears

to be the genre in which this feature has played a greater role throughout its history (and

not merely in modernism or postmodernism) than either in drama or in narrative fiction,

so that meta-poetic self-reflexivity can be said to possess at least a relative characteristic

salience;

6) existence of one seemingly unmediated consciousness or agency as the center of

the lyric utterance or experience (creating the effect of ‘monologicity’ of lyric discourse);

again, although in many cases this feature will not be applicable, it is arguably relevant

for the majority of poems and thus fulfills the condition of a prototypical trait;

7) (emotional) perspectivity and subject-rather than object – centeredness (emphasis

on) the individual perception of the lyric agency rather than on perceived objects):

this trait appears valid for the same reason as trait no. 6;

8) relative unimportance or even lack of external action and (suspenseful) narrative

development: again, in spite of examples to the contrary, this feature can be justified as

prototypical of the lyric, in particular if it is opposed to both narrative fiction and drama,

which both typically – and much more regularly than poetry – represent stories, albeit in

different forms of transmission;

9) ‘absoluteness’ of lyric utterances (dereferentialization): again, this trait appears to be

valid, since its inclusion in the list only implies – as is the case with the other eight traits

– that it is applicable to a majority of relevant texts.