“Everything goes dark in the blink of an eye” Direction of attention, genre and person marking in Péter Závada’s poems

Abstract

The paper attempts to find a connection between the patterns of attention direction in poetry, the aspect of genre schemas and the linguistic phenomenon of person marking, within the theoretical framework of the forthcoming ELTE-Lírakorpusz. In Péter Závada's volume A muréna mozgása ‘The Movement of the Murena’, there are several works that reflect on the process of observation, the (visual) direction of attention, and offer the possibility of a more traditional (transcending) meaning-making procedure (Ingamozgás/A szó árnyéka ’Pendulum motion/The shadow of a word’, Ingamozgás/A kalapács árnyéka ’Pendulum motion/The shadow of a hammer’, Munkajegyzetek/A felvezetés értelme ’Working notes/The meaning of the introduction’, Egy alma határai ‘The boundaries of an apple’). With a thorough analysis, I map the modes of poetic attentional control in the volume, adopting the categories proposed by Lucy Alford about transitive and intransitive poetic attention. And since these categories also define genre schemas in Alford’s model, the second step of the analysis examine the characteristics of person marking in the texts relying on the conclusions of genre classification, with the aim of mapping genre-specific features on the one hand, and on the other, in search of connections towards a cognitive poetic reinterpretation of certain lyric genres.