Uneasiness and Sehnsucht in the work of Georg Trakl

Author(s)

Laura de Borba Moosburger

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2019-05-28

Examining board members

Oliver Tolle; Roberto Saraiva Kahlmeyer Mertens; Juliana Pasquarelli Perez; Paulo Roberto Licht dos Santos

• Advisor: Marcio Suzuki

Abstract

This work analyses and interprets the works of Georg Trakl addressing the \"Christian uneasiness\" and \"romantic longing\" (Sehnsucht) as basilar for his poetic expression. We assess those two foundations as a desire of purity, beauty and kindness, as well as a larger meaning that could justify a world filled with sorrow, suffering and injustice. We picture the melancholy in traklian works as a result of the failure of those romantic expectancies, harmed as they were by the disenchantment of the world, the horrors of WWI and the confrontation with the so called \"demise of the Christian God\" in the beginning of the XXth century. Therefore our natural parameter of comparison is the connection of uneasiness and Sehnsucht in romanticism (the best example being Novalis), where such combination surges the hope for some kind of synchrony between human longings and the universe - expressed as the \"cosmic harmony\" idea -, and a possibility of grasping the utter object of the yearning and an enthusiastic trust in poetry and it´s potential of achievement. Trakl´s oeuvre contrasts with romanticism and drives an eminently affective reaction opposing a world adverse to any measure of spiritual aspiration: a world tainted by the lost of any transcendence and the impossibility of any poetic existence or sanctification of life by poetic means. However, from the midst of the profound sorrow and hopelessness of his poetry the cry and effort of the poet emerges attempting to reclaim precisely what is experienced as lost: the sense of purity, beauty and kindness. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/15904-5 - Developments of the romantic Sehnsucht in the poetic experiences of Rilke, Trakl, and Celan
• Grantee: Laura de Borba Moosburger de Moraes
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate