ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence of literary genres on media art by investigating their shared aesthetic structures. It analyzes the media artworks in allude to literary genres in ways that lay bare established conventions. The chapter explores allusions to and deviations from conventions of poetry, drama, and prose. In particular, the classification of lyric poetry as the 'enthusiastically excited' genre still lingers. The specific characteristic of a poetic text is that it significantly increases the number of structural levels of speech, which make it possible to establish complex relationships between those structural elements. The 'impeding' language of poetry is a result of the excess structuring on multiple levels. Maya Deren describes a structure where the 'axis of combination' in film follows, as in poetry, a non-linear, 'vertical' mode, so the poetic function dominates. The common English term 'lyric persona' avoids outdated notions of lyric subjectivity, with its "dominance of the emotive and the expressive".
