On Voice: Notes on Latin American Poetics of the Signifier

The article aims to delimit the concept of "voice" in the poem at both its intratextual and extratextual levels. This reflection, grounded in the methodological framework of French lyrical enunciation theory (Meschonnic, Maulpoix, Benoit), starts from the notion of the "un-repression of the author" (Barthes), conceiving voice as the point of intersection between the body and language. Adopting this perspective allows us to speculate that, in the "outside" of the text, the voice is understood as a consequence of the bouche-oreille mentioned by Paul Valery, and as the stage where the pulsion gives rise to poetic pulsation (Kristeva). This macro-rhetoric finds its counterpart within the text, where the voice is characterized as the sonic signature of the lyrical subject (Blasing). Various phenomena associated with the dynamics of the voice are described in the analysis of selected texts by Latin American poets. Thus, an operative concept for the analysis of contemporary poetry is achieved.