Lyric Poetry and Anthropological Reduction

Lyric poetry becomes harder to understand and increasingly marginalized due to various forms of anthropological reduction in contemporary culture (the semanticization of poetry, the sociologization of the cultural horizon, the neurocognitive interpretation of literature). It is also in an uneasy relationship with the main currents in literary studies, which, by its very nature, tends to establish fixed truths and facts about a poem, through description and research of its formal features, as well as its semantics, both internal and external: its intertextual references, its cultural, social and historical back-ground. While this is undeniably relevant, it leaves aside the overall effect and event-essence of lyric poetry, and thus its ontological horizon. Underlying these difficulties is the incompatibility of the dominant epistemological and cultural paradigms, which rely on objectual consciousness (representations and self-representations), and the direct language of lyric poetry, which oper-ates on the pre-reflective (non-objectual) consciousness by which the self is in relationship with itself and with reality as a whole.

Automated summary

Due to various forms of anthropological reduction in contemporary culture, lyric poetry becomes harder to understand and increasingly marginalized. It is in an uneasy relationship with the main currents in literary studies, which tend to establish fixed truths and facts about a poem, leaving aside the overall effect and event-essence of lyric poetry. These difficulties arise from the incompatibility between dominant epistemological and cultural paradigms and the direct language of lyric poetry.