Der lyrische Augenblick als Paradigma des modernen Bewusstseins

The moment is a recurring motif in European lyric poetry and can refer to such diverse concepts as the moment of falling in love, the ability to capture the right moment, or a shocking experience. The author examines the moment as a figure of thought and as a paradigm of modern consciousness by focusing on its presence in Friedrich Schlegel’s pre-romantic poetics of the fragment which develops Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics. Close readings of poems by the great European poets Giacomo Leopardi, Charles Baudelaire, and Rainer Maria Rilke extend the structural components of the moment as an aesthetic category. The poets’ aesthetic reflections are taken into consideration as well as eminent poems on the moment, such as L’infinito, À une passante or the Sonette an Orpheus.