"None should now expect a song of mine" : on elaborating the elegiac model of lyric in the poetry of János Arany

The study tries to redefine the notion of elegy through analysing some poems by János Arany. Another aim of the investigation is to harmonize functional cognitive pragmatics with cognitive poetics on a theoretical level. According to our central presupposition, the generic schema of elegy does not merely consist of typical recurrent motifs (e.g. expressions of sadness and resignation, figurative structures of time and motion, contrast between the past and the present); rather, elegiac composition can be considered primarily a discursive schema, the instantiation of which offers the reader a reconceptualization of the present through the involvement and the interaction of diverse epistemic perspectives. From this it follows that the mental contextualization of the lyric speaker’s cognitive and verbal activity plays an important role in reading elegies. The process of apostrophe contributes to a figurative elaboration of the mental context; hence it gains its significance in the intersubjective construal of the present, as well as in the presentification of the speaker as subject. The so-called elegiac motifs or devices occur in the cognitive and meaning-creating process of poeticization, in which the reader can not only dispense with her/his limits in social cognition, but s/he can also reflect on the construed nature of the present. This reflection results in epistemic vagueness which is the basic experience of an elegy. The paper demonstrates the details and the explanatory potential of the proposed model through analysing a prototypical elegy (A lejtőn – On the Slope), a non-prototypical one (Balzsamcsepp – Drop of the Balm), and a classical ode (Magányban – In Solitude).