Felt Anticipation: Rhythm, Expectation, and Emotion in Friederike Mayröcker’s Poetic Spoken Atmospheres
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Víctor Bermúdez
Abstract
This paper addresses the work of the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) with an interdisciplinary approach contextualised within Cognitive Poetics and Cognitive Literary Theory studies. The specific focus of this study is the voice and the meaning produced through the proposed notion of a ‘poetic spoken atmosphere’. The poetic spoken atmosphere is understood here not as the unique property of an audio-text but rather as an intersubjective phenomenon emerging at the intersection of the poetic language and a listener. This notion underlines the importance of voice and its effects in the dynamics of poetry reception in order to investigate sound patterns and meaning-making dynamics, approaching three specific processes – rhythm, expectation, and emotion. The general theoretical frame of this study is based on principles of both phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Likewise, the analysis of Mayröcker’s poems is based on her recordings, available on the Lyrikline platform of the Haus für Poesie Berlin, from which spectrograms were generated to complement the textual and acoustic analysis. The observations of this study address the vocal structures modulating what can be termed an ‘insideness’, which allows to analyze sound attributes such as duration, intensity, ubiquity, and disappearing. Recognising such attributes help us to understand the emotional level of poetic sounds, i. e. the relationship between feeling and meaning in listening, hypothesising that meaning is indeed felt. Finally, the paper offers a comparative perspective that suggests further research on the basis of the paper’s theoretical-analytical methodology, and it provides specific examples from several literary systems.
Note
This paper is the result of two research stays – at the University of Oslo (2022) and at the University of Munich (2023), whose colleagues I wish to thank here.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Distant-Reading Communities: Monolingualisation in Fin-de-Siècle European Literary Historiography
- „Eine Sprache ausstellen“
- Transtextual Paths: Dream of the Red Chamber as a Source of Borgesian Labyrinth
- Indigenous Feminism in Environmental Sustainability: Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on A Road (1942)
- Felt Anticipation: Rhythm, Expectation, and Emotion in Friederike Mayröcker’s Poetic Spoken Atmospheres
- Look Back in Hunger: The Metaphorization of Women as Food in Tim O’Brien’s Tomcat in Love
- Review
- Sarah Maria Teresa Goeth: Analogie zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik. Eine Vermittlungsfigur der Moderne bei Kant, Novalis und Goethe. Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. 377 S.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Distant-Reading Communities: Monolingualisation in Fin-de-Siècle European Literary Historiography
- „Eine Sprache ausstellen“
- Transtextual Paths: Dream of the Red Chamber as a Source of Borgesian Labyrinth
- Indigenous Feminism in Environmental Sustainability: Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on A Road (1942)
- Felt Anticipation: Rhythm, Expectation, and Emotion in Friederike Mayröcker’s Poetic Spoken Atmospheres
- Look Back in Hunger: The Metaphorization of Women as Food in Tim O’Brien’s Tomcat in Love
- Review
- Sarah Maria Teresa Goeth: Analogie zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik. Eine Vermittlungsfigur der Moderne bei Kant, Novalis und Goethe. Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. 377 S.
