“But What Does It Mean?” – Breaking Grounds for Poetry as Communication

David Holtgrave

Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

Poetry has only very recently been acknowledged as an art form eligible to its own philosophical investigation by analytical aesthetics. And while most of the peculiar questions and challenges are today very well set and defined and answers debated, what seems to me lacking is a more general approach to poetry trying to put the puzzle together.

As can be shown, most of the issues philosophers find with poetry are issues somehow revolving around the peculiar language use in poems and our understanding of it as conveying some kind of meaning. I therefore take the philosophically most fundamental question about poetry to be this: How to make sense of poetry as a communicative practice?

To answer this I will provide an outline for a theory that answers this question and thereby allows for answers and explanations of the issues at hand in the following. Drawing on a basic model of communication, in which a Sender S conveys some kind of communicative content cC to a receiver R by means of a communicative vehicle cV, I will argue that what happens in poetry is that a poet (S) tries to convey a finegrained perspective (cC) to a reader or listener (R) by letting them retrieve it through the experience of the poem (cV).

For a terminological framework I will show how both semantics and pragmatics fail to account for the “meaning” of poetry and instead recover a more general notion of “expression” that allows for accounting for poetry as a fundamentally communicative endeavor.

While this might seem like a rather traditional and somehow out of fashion approach to the arts and especially poetry, most of the typical problems of such an expressivist account can easily be dissolved not only be reference to the actual experiences of readers and writers but also by the ways we can extend our ideas of communication, intentionality, expression and perspective while still holding them true to our intuitions.

Chair: Tamaki Komada

Time: 05 September, 10:40 – 11:10

Location: SR 1.006