Performanz, Textualität und Kognition

Abstract

This paper traces recent developments in the study of early Greek lyric poetry and suggests some tracks that could be followed in the near future. Research on early Greek lyric poetry has undergone significant change over the last five decades. From the 1970ies onwards, scholars tended to emphasize the performative context of the songs, including its social or cultic function. Only in recent years have interpreters started to rediscover the textual dimension of the poems, i.e. their status as literary texts that were intended to be received beyond their primary performance. Other vibrant fields of research that have been recently, or could be fruitfully, applied to early Greek lyric poetry include historical narratology, diachronic narratology, and cognitive poetics. In order to illustrate some of these developments and potential, I summarize recent approaches to the problem of the poetic ›I‹ in Pindar, including my own model, and suggest the more general phenomenon of underdetermined reference as a possible topic for future research on different branches of lyric poetry.