Bakhtin and Lyric Poetry

Abstract

This essay reopens the issue of lyric monologism. Widely considered as a weak point in Bakhtin’s genre theory, the conception of the monologic structure of lyric poetry has attracted many attempts at corrections of that concept, drawing attention to the unquestionable dialogical tendencies in poetry. Instead of providing further arguments in this vein, the essay provisionally accepts poetry’s monologism as a starting point and discusses some of the key elements of the conception in its early version (that is, Bakhtin’s account of the chorus as lyrical authority in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity). In a further step, it addresses Bakhtin’s contradictory approach to the category of trope in poetry, an issue brought to the fore by Paul de Man’s somewhat enigmatic commentary on The Discourse in the Novel. Finally, it raises the question whether there is a real contradiction between the structure of the trope and the internal dialogism attributed to prosaic discourse in Bakhtin’s view. In order to discuss this issue, one has to reconsider Bakthin’s (and Voloshinov’s) notion of “intonational metaphor” and their implicit distinction between dialogism and citationality.