La transgression des genres dans les poèmes en prose de Georg Trakl

The three prose texts in Trakl’s poem collection Sebastian im Traum (1915) blend the fictional and the autobiographic, as well as the poetic and the narrative elements in such a way that the interlocking of these different dimensions does not allow a definite literary classification. Just like in his verse poetry, Trakl’s prose poetry on the one hand falls back upon different genres only to transgress their limits immediately, and on the other hand it also takes in different types of voices : the first person of autobiography and of lyrical expression, the second person of inner monologue and of the narcissistic and/or schizophrenic Doppelgänger, the third person of epic narration or of fantasized biography as well as the first person plural of considerations about human fate. However, because of the size of the poems, the genre boundaries seem to be even more blurred in Trakl’s prose poems than in his versified poetry. They therefore show evidence of the indefiniteness which is constitutive of modern poetry at the turn of the 20th century.