Rather than conceiving of poetry as a container of biographically determined meaning, medieval Arabo-Persian poetics emphasize the impact that texts have on the human body and psyche. Medieval manuals on mystical practices describe the correlation between ecstatic states of consciousness and the experience of listening to lyric poetry. In a similar vein, contemporary theorizations conceive of lyric as a suspended gesture that neither mimics external reality nor provides readers with purely fictional worlds. According to such models, the sharing of lyric poetry is conceived as an act-event that must be performed by a reading or listening subject in order to generate meaning. By juxtaposing medieval Persian poetics with modern paradigms through a critical inquiry that is both circular and cross-cultural, this article shows how a new affective theory of the lyric can account for experiences of enchantment, disenchantment, and partial self-loss that redefine the boundaries of selfhood and regulate the reader's jouissance when embodying lyric texts.
Domenico Ingenito (Thu,) studied this question.