Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung.

This paper will explore the effects of integrating short poetic forms into a prose text. It examines Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung (1575), a German adaptation/translation of François Rabelais’s novel Gargantua that incorporates various citations to produce an intricate text in prose. Among them are over one hundred excerpts from contemporary popular songs that contain both verse and rhyme. Instead of arranging them as a prosimetrum with clear separations between prose and poetry, Fischart fits these songs seamlessly into his prose fabric, leaving no formal features that instantly distinguish them as non-prose. As a result, he obliterates the distinction between poetry and prose. This paper will argue that there are no concepts from humanist poetics capable of explaining this way of mixing poetry and prose. Through extensive formal analysis, it will reconstruct Fischart’s particular technique of incorporating short poetic forms into a prose text, arguing that this technique produces an original form of hybrid textuality [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]