Modalidades do estranho na poesia de William Butler Yeats

Abstract

This thesis has as its object of study three modalities of the uncanny as they appear in the poetry of Irish writer William Butler Yeats. They are: the incidence of the Double, the contact with the Deads, their way of operation in the metaphysical sphere as well as in the world of the Living, and the Animist way of thinking which embraces the omnipotence of thought. We believe that this is possible to be theoretically thought and analyzed through the ideas presented by Sigmund Freud in his essay titled The uncanny ( Das Unheimliche ), edited in 1919. In order to help our discussion of the problem, we used some considerations from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For example, what he exposes in his seminar dedicated to the anxiety and in his essay on the mirror stage . Many important ideas and concepts from literary critics such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Tzvetan Todorov, Emil Staiger, Joseph Warren Beach, Ezra Pound, among others, were also used as basis for the development of our discussion on the theme of the strangeness (uncanny) in the frontiers between literature and psychoanalysis. The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche also helped us to understand the concept that Yeats developed and used of tragic joy and the relationship of the poet with the tragic thinking, discussed by the German philosopher and which influenced the work of the Irish writer. This influence made possible, in the poetry Yeats wrote, appear an aspect of absurdity, of ambition for being assimilated in the chorus of the tragedy visible, for instance, in the chapter about the Double and that we can find in his most important poems.