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The present article discusses, in a first step, ground-breaking recent publications on the lyric subject, and dedicates itself, in a second step, to a new concept of lyric persona, which is devised to overcome the constrictions of the categories of subject and subjectivity and to open access of theory to all kinds and eras of lyric poetry from the Old English Seafarer to modern concrete poetry. The first book to be reviewed is Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht. Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute (2021), a collection of essays which pursues an argumentatively stimulating dialogical strategy. The articles begin with Wolf Schmid’s twenty theses on the abstract author, an appropriation of the narratological »implicit« author to the theory of lyric poetry. This statement is followed by a number of articles which alternatingly argue in favour of and against the concept of the abstract author. Peter Hühn, for instance, believes the term to be analytically especially fruitful, while Ralph Müller speaks of it as a »narratological spectre«. It is significant that, using Schmid’s term, Rainer Grübel analyzes a number of intriguing modern Russian poems, which he calls hybrid, since he identifies transitions from poetic to quasi reality-related passages and diagnoses concomitant stylistic changes in the texts. The international perspective is then widened by a comprehensive investigation of Russian, German and English terminological traditions. Marion Rutz demonstrates that handbooks and textbooks are by far not compatible. Among other terms she deals with the controversial German term »das lyrische Ich« (the lyric I). An investigation of the use of this term is then afforded by Hermann Korte’s examination of the poetry and poetics of Gottfried Benn, Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein. Subsequently, a group of articles deals with the fate of the subject in recent and current German poetry. Analyzing poems by Sabine Scho, Anne Cotton and Thomas Kling, Friederike Reents verifies, instead of »subject fatigue«, new ...
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