Der Prototyp Tier bei Hofmannsthal : Eine Semantische Studie über den Chandosbrief

One of the famous works of Hofmannsthal, «the Letter of Lord Chandos» (1902), was, for a fairly long time, wellknown as his personal confession on the crisis of literary activities. Surprisingly, details of the poetic and the linguistic aspects of this work have not yet been sufficently investigated. Based on the recent theories of prototypes semantics, e. g. Schwarz (1992a and b), Schwarz and Chur (1993) etc., this article deals with the prototype animal in the Letter of Chandos and tries to postulate from the view of semantics that the Letter is not Hofmannsthal's personal confession, but rather an artistic literary work on literature in itself and for itself