What Does Your Subject Do? On the Contradictory History of the Lyrical Subject

Marta Koronkiewicz

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A b s t r a k t

The article aims to analyse contradictions and ambiguities embedded in the structuralist concept of “the lyrical subject”. The researcher reviews contemporary applications of the term and overviews a history of related concepts in order to show meaningful shifts in the default meaning of the issuer in contemporary literary criticism. Initial programmatic abstractness of the “lyrical subject”, both intended and politically motivated, has been reduced to a general intuition concerning the non-identity of the author and the speaking subject. The secondary consequence is that it obfuscates perceiving issuers as the effects of specific and intended authorial decisions.