New theoretical approaches to the study of lyric poetry

Abstract

This paper examines two recent and opposite models for the study of the lyric genre: mimetic-narratological and performative, two important contributions of international literary criticism to the field. Nevertheless, they have had scarcely any repercussions in Spanish literary theory. First, we focus on the narratological applications to the study of poetic and lyric texts. Second, we address Jonathan Culler's theoretical proposal developed in his book Theory of the Lyric, in which he rejects the assimilation of lyric poetry to the model of narrative fiction, and he proposes instead to investigate its singularity, not imitative but performative.