A Companion to the literature of German Expressionism

Although the historical crisis of 'Western civilisation' in the period preceding and during the First World War is one of the dominant themes of Expressionist poetry, the terms of East-West discourse itself seldom feature in its diction, a circumstance that can be related to the movement's universalistic assumptions. Two exceptions to this rule are Georg Trakl's poems 'Abendländisches Lied' and 'Abendland', in which the poet exploits the time-space juncture implicit in the compound 'Abendland' for his own thematic purposes. The association established in these titles between a culturally loaded space and evening provides the basis for Trakl's articulation of visions of natural and historical decline that within the poems themselves are figured concurrently on several time-scales: diurnal, seasonal and cultural-historical. By contrast, the lack of any equivalent association in the title of another poem, 'Im Osten', prefigures its portrayal of a sudden and dramatic evacuation of culture from the space it designates. A comparative reading of these three poems reveals not only to what extent and in what ways Trakl poetically revalorises familiar terms of symbolic geography, but also which semantic nuances the terms themselves carried within the context of the late Habsburg Empire.

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The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past: Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares

Ramírez¹

2013

arq

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A Companion to the literature of German Expressionism

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From the Evening‐Land to the Wild East: Symbolic Geography in Three Poems by Georg Trakl

The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past: Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares

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