The figurative construction of the night from hymns to the Night by Novalis

• Grant number: 11/22999-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2012
• End date: February 28, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Scheel
• Grantee: Natália Fernanda da Silva Trigo
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project aims to analyze the measure in which Hymns to the Night, by the German poet Novalis, can be considered a poem in prose, since it breaks the classic idea that poetry must be compound in verses, and because there's the unrolling from the prose to the verse and, finally, searching to establish how the poems represent the singular transformation of the poetic form. We'll also search to comprehend the figurative construction of the night in the poem and verify how the conception of the night relates to the fundamental aspects of German romanticism: the fusion of many forms (prose and poetry, music and poetry), the nostalgia from the past, the mysticism, the melancholy of the night, the pessimism; as well as with the romantic theory of the symbol, revealing how this figurative construction is present in the romantic conception of the symbol, in other words, the relation between signifier and signified (what something can mean and not what it really means), the way how the symbol calls attention first to itself, establishing how the poet works with the symbol and its meaning, that, in the poem, differently from the communication, is motivated, in other words, the choice of symbolic elements is extremely worked by the author in the process of construction of the meaning in the poem. We search to comprehend how the exaltation of the figure of the night and its mysticism break with the values of classic poetry and rationality (opposing itself to the rigidity, the balance, the order, and the harmony) therefore, associating the figure of the night to the liberation, not only a formal liberation as well as a creative one. The romantic poem, differently from the classical, values freedom of expression and individual subjectivity.(AU)