Chapter II: The Problem of Sense
Andrew Webber
From Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil (1990), pp. 17-35, doi:10.59860/td.c6ab2c5
Click cover to enlarge
| Part of the book: Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil Andrew Webber MHRA Texts and Dissertations 30 Bithell Series of Dissertations 15 Modern Humanities Research Association for the Institute of Germanic Studies ModernGermanPoetryFictionPhilosophyopen Abstract. The construal of sense in the act of reading can be said to depend upon the two scales according to which any narrative is coordinated: continuity (that is, a sense of development through time) and contiguity (that is, a sense of relative disposition in space). In Trakl's mäture work these two scales are radically subverted, rendering the coordination of the reader's progress through the text intensely problematic. The shifts in tense and location, the peripeteia, lacunae and equivocation, which characterise his mature poetic discourse, are bound to militate constantly against the conventional expectations of a poem's sense of direction; thereby threatening any notion of a community of sense between poet and reader within the text. Furthermore the poetry resists the conventions of identity in the figures which move within it, and of the symbol as a reliable touchstone in the interpretation of poetic figures. The overriding impression is one of dislocation, of a poetic world progressively defamiliarised, on occasion to the point of senselessness. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |