Acts of the mind: The nature of lyric experience.
Item
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Title
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Acts of the mind: The nature of lyric experience.
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Identifier
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AAI3205025
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identifier
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3205025
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Creator
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Lattig, Sharon.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan T. Richardson
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Biology, Neuroscience
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Abstract
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The genre of lyric is distinguished by the activity of the substrate of consciousness it both occasions and records. In understanding lyric to be the formal recapitulation of the neurological cycles of perception, action, and emotion as they transpire for an embedded and embodied organism, this project cultivates a syncretic theory of the genre that renders contingent, feature-based definitions interdependent and mutually generative.;Lyric, it is argued, is instigated within a social alienation figured as an exile. The threat posed by the subversive poet-singer to his society and the inevitable betrayal of the poet by that society are enlightened by Platonic doctrine, myths of poetic origin, and philosophical theories of the individual. Social dislocation motivates a complex of symptoms that sustains lyric expression, including the distillation of being to an affective ontology encompassing the extremes of lament and celebration and the attenuation of subjectivity. The displacement forces attention to the workings of the individual mind as it negotiates anomaly.;The obscurity that characterizes lyric poetry is a reification of perception's origins within environmental embeddedness. From an organism-centered perspective, potential registers somatically as emotion, which plays an evaluative role in cognition: it is realized through action that projects potential embeddedness forward. Perception is initially an articulating mechanism whose function is to select input from the environment and to differentiate it into features by means of neuronal contrast mechanisms. Lyric poetry realizes this directionality through its deployment of deixis, musicality, and formal discontinuity. The ode, the elegy, apostrophe, and prosopopoeia are argued to be large-scale elaborations of the articulating, objectifying processes of perception embodied in the oscillating motion of neuronal networks.;Long held to be a vehicle of poetic creativity, the figure of metaphor is located within the amalgamating activity of perception. An archaeology of the pathetic fallacy locates its origins within a breach of intentionality the perceptually-based activity of metaphor seeks to remedy. Neurodynamic theories of perception (involving the application of deterministic chaos theory) are adduced in order to argue for the dynamic identity of poetic metaphor and perception as functions that reconcile the ontological and the epistemological.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
