![ost youth drama china closing ost youth drama china closing](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MYZGCh7kUf8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Lyrics, in the latter case, “strive to be an event.” 5 If we expand the distinction between semantic and nonsemantic features to include the use of music and image, we can easily recognize popular songs, including those composed for television dramas, in poetic terms. 4 (emphasis original)Īs “act,” Culler continues, the “figure of voice” can be both a personal utterance and an extravagant exaggeration. … In thinking about lyric, it is crucial to begin with a distinction between the voice that speaks and the poet who made the poem, thus creating this figure of voice.
![ost youth drama china closing ost youth drama china closing](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2D7R8PjKIl0/V5ReXyuTBaI/AAAAAAAABMY/mnkOTbBDG7MJ5U5ZJjsYzmaC0cb6MBUgACLcB/s1600/21-5.png)
How do the non-semantic features of language work? What effects, conscious and unconscious, do they have? What sorts of interaction between semantic and non-semantic features can be expected? … For the poem as act, a key question has been the relation between the act of the author who writes the poem and that of the speaker or “voice” that speaks there. For the poem conceived as verbal construction, a major question is the relation between meaning and the non-semantic features of language, such as sound and rhythm. Jonathan Culler, conscious of the influence of poststructuralist theory, for example, defines poetics as “linguistic acts of all kinds.” 3 Speaking of “acts,” Culler points out one aspect of poetics that is especially relevant to my discussion at hand:Ī poem is both a structure made of words (a text) and an event (an act of the poet, an experience of the reader, an event in literary history). What is sung and how it is sung, whether the lyrics complement or contradict a particular drama’s theme, in what ways they do so, whose voice the lyrics represent, what the music and visual images say about the lyrics, and what some of the recurrent tropes are constitute some of the questions I will explore in the following.īefore addressing these questions in conjunction with specific songs, let me take a step back and offer a brief discussion of what I mean by “popular poetics.” Today, a textual definition of “poetics” has to take into consideration the contributions of recent theoretical developments in literary theory and criticism, especially in terms of understanding how and why definitions of “poetics” have now become part of “theory” itself and why they have been expanded beyond the traditional understanding of poetry. As such, they offer another point of entry into understanding contemporary Chinese mainstream culture and the social and ideological implications within it. 2 Although they have existed under the radar of critics, as part of television drama and popular culture, their musically conveyed expression nevertheless manifests a range of sentiments, indeed the pathos of the age. Some of them have become part of the regular repertoire of popular music, often heard independent of their original dramas. 1 Together with the exponential increase in the production of television dramas in the last three decades, the bulk of songs composed for them has also accumulated into a phenomenon of its own. In an age when poetry reading has become a marginalized activity, popular songs, among them those composed for television dramas, have, for better or for worse, become (popular) poetics of the age. This chapter switches gears to focus on a ubiquitous but little noticed phenomenon: songs-especially their lyrics-composed for television dramas.