Autor, abstrakter Autor und Adressant in der Lyrik

Abstract

AbstractTitle: Author, abstract Author and Addresser in Lyric Poetry, Or Who Says: „Sonette find ich sowas von beschissen“? Until present day, the concept of „abstract author has mainly been described and discussed in the context of narrative literature (see e.g. Schmid, Wolf: Elemente der Narratologie. 3., erw. und überarb. Auflage. Berlin 2014., 72 f., see also the critical survey by Kindt/Müller 2006). It was only relatively late that the concept was adopted in poetry analysis, but even then it was usually linked to narrative research resp. narratology. Nonetheless, there are specific lyricological developments that have become relevant to the debate. For example, the criticism against the so-called „intentional fallacy“ by Wimsatt and Beardsley (2000) has been originally described by examples of poetry. At first glance, the critique of the intentional fallacy appears to be an unlikely candidate for a theory of authorship. Since Wimsatt and Beardsley criticise all recourse to authorial intentions as irrelevant at best, and as an error at worst, this approach is not in itself compatible with the theory of the abstract author. Nevertheless, there are some indications that the criticism of intentional fallacy has had a lasting effect on concepts of the „abstract author“ or a text-internal „subject of composition“ in that they have been used to respond to the challenges of intentional fallacy. The inconsistencies resulting from these attempts can be seen as an argument for abandoning the term „abstract author“ from literary theory. However, the lasting influence of the critique of the „intentional fallacy“ also suggests that the existing alternative concepts of the „postulated author“ („postulierter Autor“) and „author images in the text“ („Autorbilder im Text“, cf. Kindt/Müller 2006) do not offer any terminology for the common practice of lyric interpretation which treats poems as author-independent templates for generating meaning. This paper proposes to use the term „text subject“ for this function, but at the same time discusses the issue of whether scientific hermeneutics is possible on this basis.SchlüsselwörterLyrikAbstrakter AutorImplied authorImplizierter AutorTextsubjektKompositionssubjektAdressantIntentionaler Fehlschluss / lyricAbstract authorImplied authorIntentional fallacyTextual subjectsAddresser