Conclusion

This chapter bridges the gap between historicism and formalism through a new model for lyric. Different kinds of explanation suit different levels of analysis: validity in interpretation is tied to analytic level. Proposed here is a theory of the middle range—Franco Moretti’s genre, Jonathan Culler’s poetics. “Lyric” indicates the kind of poem recognized since the eighteenth century as such—hence, as the extreme form of the literary. A process resembling thinking happens in such densely coded, layered, and self-reflexive poems. The model suggested, however, is not self-reflexivity but self-assembly through a transhistorical recursive process that equally applies beyond conventionally defined agents, subjects, and mental states. As a byproduct of recursion, lyric subjectivity is homologous with processes in the physical and biological sciences, as conceptualized in dynamic systems theory. Such systems spontaneously select for their own boundaries and identity, their own relevant contexts: entity and environment are co-created.