Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil
Abstract
This book undertakes a comparative reassessment of psychosexual concerns in the works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil. The two authors, so different in other respects, are shown to converge in their coordinated treatment of the problematics of sense and sensuality. In either case a narcissistic ideal of androgynous union with the sister as 'Doppelgänger im anderen Geschlecht' is set up, only to be revoked by the compulsive return to incestuous violence and inner division. By disrupting the quest for poetic and discursive sense, sexual antagonism operates at once as the prime mover in the more general crisis of selfhood and as the prime stumbling-block for the pursuit of aesthetic ends in either oeuvre. This book, originally published in paperback in 1990 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-33-3, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Keywords
Drama; Women AuthorsDOI
10.59860/td.b37fd0aISBN
9781839546686, 9781839546686Publisher
Modern Humanities Research AssociationPublication date and place
Cambridge, 1990Imprint
Texts and TranslationsSeries
MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 30Classification
Plays, playscripts