THE GRAMMATICAL ARCHITECTONICS OF ROMANTIC DISCOURSE: DEICTICS AND FIGURE IN ROMANTIC LYRICS (STRUCTURALIST, POETICS, LINGUISTICS)

How do we read lyric poetry? What grammatical and rhetorical structures of language interplay to create the special mode of linguistic experience generated by lyrics? How do we construe the recurrent contradictions in theme, figure, syntax, and genre in Romantic texts, and what is their relationship to the theory and "project" of Romantic poetics?;My study concentrates on deictics, the grammatical markers of person, time, and space in language, such as pronouns, tense, temporal and spatial adverbs, and demonstratives. Deictics constitute a fundamental category of language through which discourse identifies its participants and contextual parameters (spatial and temporal). They comprise an intrinsic subsystem of reference, based not in relation to objective reference but in relation to the position of the speaker in the moment of the discourse act. They furnish the means by which a text constructs (or induces the reader to construct) its situation of discourse as well as transforms its personal, temporal, and spatial dimensions and, in correlation, its level of cognition and mode of discursive organization. Thus, deictics reflect in their arrangements and interactions with other textual constituents the influence of subjective agency in the structural and thematic process of the text. Through mapping the shifts in deictics in relation to other significant structures in the text, my readings attempt to distinguish the grammatical architectonics of Romantic lyrics of apostrophe, their linguistic organization of heterogeneous figures and modes of representation; and in so doing, I attempt to mark and follow the complex trail of the Romantic dialectic in syntax and figures. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).;My dissertation proposes to develop methods of reading lyrics (particularly problematical texts that incorporate thematic and structural contradiction) which elucidate how these texts use language in distinctive ways to organize ambiguous, contradictory, and deconstructive meaning. I regard Romantic lyrics of apostrophe as self-reflexive texts which explore, through their own acts of fictionalizing, the nature of poetic experience and expression. Through thematic and structural signs of doubleness, Romantic lyrics foreground the intentional character of poetic creation; they call into question the authority of poetic voice and the authenticity of its vision, as they proclaim the enduring value of imaginative works.