ABSTRACT

The Dutch-Flemish literary project De eenzame uitvaart (The lonely funeral) consists of city-based groups of poets who write poems and perform them at funerals of fellow citizens who died lonely and often anonymously. At first sight, this project could be considered as a revival of the genre of occasional poetry and, more generally, as an exponent of the ‘revenge’ of the lyric in the twenty-first century. This revenge, a term borrowed from Thomas Vaessens, implies that contemporary poetry no longer functions as a marginal and elitist genre but has reconquered its popular status and societal value – in short, its heteronomous function. This paper aims to question this idea of the lyric’s revenge by analysing the ambitions (as expressed by the initiators of the project) and a selection of poems of De eenzame uitvaart. It contends that the project is founded on a firm belief in the potency of the lyric and its specific language but that this belief is often contradicted by the hesitant rhetoric of the actual poems. This discrepancy between great ambitions and hesitant practice is interpreted as a symptom of the contemporary status of the lyric, which takes revenge yet only reluctantly.

摘要

荷兰-佛兰德文学项目De eenzame uitvaart（孤独的葬礼) 由以城市为基础的诗人团体组成，他们写诗并在同胞的葬礼上表演，他们孤独地死去，通常是匿名的。乍一看，这个项目可以被认为是偶然诗歌体裁的复兴，更一般地说，它是二十一世纪抒情诗“复仇”的代表。这种报复，借用了托马斯·瓦森斯的一个术语，暗示当代诗歌不再作为边缘和精英流派，而是重新征服了它的流行地位和社会价值——简而言之，它的他律性功能。本文旨在通过分析野心（正如项目发起人所表达的）和De eenzame uitvaart的诗歌选集，来质疑这种歌词的复仇思想. 它认为该项目是建立在对歌词效力及其特定语言的坚定信念之上的，但这种信念往往与实际诗歌犹豫不决的修辞相矛盾。这种雄心勃勃与犹豫不决的做法之间的差异被解释为抒情诗的当代地位的症状，它报复却只是不情愿。