In Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle und in Stanley Kubricks filmischer Adaption Eyes Wide Shut ist die Maske zentrales Darstellungsmittel von Schaulust, Blick und Scham. So, wie die Maske das Gesicht ...verhüllt, so versucht der Beschämte, sich vor dem enthüllenden Blick des Anderen zu verbergen. Ausgehend von der aktuellen psychoanalytischen Scham-Theorie wird hier erstmals gezeigt, wie die spezifische Medialität von Scham und Maske nicht nur die Figuren, sondern auch die ästhetischen Strategien in Text und Film maßgeblich prägt und reflektiert. Dies betrifft u.a. die Wahrnehmung des Zuschauers/Lesers, die filmische und literarische Inszenierung des Blicks, die Visualität und die Frage der Darstellbarkeit.
Like the literary writing of Clara Katharina Pollaczek, Arthur Schnitzler's correspondence with her has not received the attention it deserves from critics. It is not merely a substantial ...biographical source, but also shows how he conducted himself in that genre of writing (a correspondence with a lover) on which his creativity depended.
The works in this portfolio demonstrate the result of my journey of creative explorations over the past five years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and ...the Columbia University. The set of nine original compositions covers a wide range of instrumentation that includes the conventional string quartet, small and larger ensembles, the choir, and the full orchestra. All works (except for the final orchestral piece) were either commissioned or written for specific performing groups including the Portumnus Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, and Sirius Quartet, etc. Last Dance of the Prey and La Ronde reveal where I departed, as a Chinese composer in search of her national identity. The use of the baban concept in phrase building and rhythmic grouping, and the treatment of the Chinese Sheng in a journey from suppression to explosion were among the challenges under which problems related to Chinese elements in a western context were tackled. Nirvana was inspired by the legendary rebirth of the phoenix. The Fly and The Sick Rose both resulted from my reading of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Wires was based on Philip Larkin's poem of the same title. Legends and poetries were consistent themes of my music. They provided plotlines of sense and sight, of colors and images that piloted the dramatic flow of my music, shaping all along my creative purposes as a woman composer and a mother. This process led into expressions through more subtle interpretations resulting from the pull of emotions and inspirations, as seen in the rhythmic treatment of my String Quartet No. 2. Das Parfum brought the idea further into a fascinating world of fragrance, revealing the beauty of the sense and shape (of perfume bottles) through the charm of music. As a pianist, I have always enjoyed playing my own music as well as conceiving and cultivating my thoughts while being a part of the live music-making process on stage. My parallel roles as a performer and a composer, and my identities as a Chinese and a female, as I look back, all have decisive parts to play in shaping my musical style and creative tendencies to date.
This dissertation develops out of the disturbing realization that masculinity is pervasively represented as 'in crisis.' It argues that both 'masculinity' and 'crisis' are discursive constructs, ...which have been functioning in unison since the late nineteenth century to bolster male hegemony. My introductory chapter offers an explication of how discursive domination functions at the level of signification. It explains, and applies to numerous examples, the method of discourse analysis developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and also engages with Reinhardt Koselleck's critical history of the concept 'crisis,' which has recently been further developed in the work of Janet Roitman. In chapter two I examine the roots of the 'masculinity in crisis' discourse in the European fin de siècle. This search proceeds by way of readings of Rémy de Gourmont's La Dissociation des Idées, Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, and Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter. Chapter two also examines the crucial role that the representation of women played in defining masculinity as 'in crisis' during the period. My third and fourth chapters offer in-depth readings of several literary and cinematic works, these showing that while 'masculinity' being represented as 'in crisis' is a constant, the forms and tropes employed in this representation vary over time and are geographically contingent. I focus in chapter three on Arthur Schnitzler's stories Leutnant Gustl and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief, prose works within which contemporaneous psychological, gender and class discourses converge in protagonists representative of bourgeois Austrian masculinity 'in crisis.' Chapter four argues by way of analyses of the canonical Weimar era films Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari and Die Straße as well as Ernst Toller's Heimkehrer drama Hinkemann that the sudden postwar domination of the discursive field by visual forms of media—what Martin Jay calls 'a scopic regime'—resulted in 'masculinity in crisis' becoming increasingly spectral—taking on ghostly and/or monstrous forms—and spectacular, namely as an event staged for the voyeuristic gaze. In my conclusion I pursue answers to why 'masculinity' has been for over a century, and more importantly continues to be, pervasively represented as 'in crisis.'
My dissertation investigates the representation of silences surrounding and affecting various female protagonists in works written by male authors between the years 1894 and 1924. The three works ...discussed in this project, Fontane’s novel Effi Briest, Wedekind’s diptych Lulu, combining his two plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, and Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else, all bear their female protagonist’s name in their respective titles, suggesting that the authors have given these female characters a voice in these texts that enables the audience to experience their story from a female perspective. My analysis of the three texts reevaluates this notion of “giving a voice to someone” by shedding light on the different ways in which expression is influenced, manipulated and hindered through the superimposed voices of the society, the parents and the men in these protagonists’ stories. Originality and authorship are two related aspects that inform my reading of the protagonists’ silence and their use of quotations and literary references when creating their own narratives. As my analysis shows, they struggle less to find a voice of their own than to piece together a story in the form of a collage composed of different quotations and voices. In doing so, a new realm of possibilities emerges, one that is located between passive repetition and quoting and active formulation of ideas, namely that of the middle voice. Reading these three texts in terms of their representation of (female) silence, silencing and body language, my project uncovers intricate connections between all three texts and all three protagonists, illuminating their respective involuntary as well as strategic uses of both verbal and non-verbal communication.
Shi Zhecun (1905-2003), an avant-garde modernist writer in 1930s Shanghai, claimed that his works "were influenced by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), while breaking away from the influence." That is to ...say, Freudian psychoanalysis was Sinicized (i.e. became influenced by Chinese thought or culture) in Shi Zhecun's fiction writing. The discomposure caused by the vacillation between, and the entwinement of Chinese heritage and Western civilization was characteristic of the Chinese psyche in the 1930s, particularly in Shanghai, the most Westernized city. This thesis contributes to delving into the struggle between and the entanglement of Chinese tradition and Western influence in terms of the Sinicization of Freudian psychoanalysis. I argue that Shi Zhecun adopted Freudian thought to psychoanalyze the mindset of urban youth in 1930s Shanghai through the lens of psychical mechanisms and pathologies, and thereby, this practice of Sinicizing Freudian psychoanalysis was subtly characterized by using hesitation and entanglement. I will take a contextualizing approach to two stories: "A Rainy Evening" (1929), and "Devil's Way" (1931), to demonstrate the Sinicization of Freudian psychoanalysis.
My doctoral thesis focuses on the subject of death in modern European literature, specifically in the novels The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy, Dying by Arthur Schnitzler, The Buddenbrook by ...Thomas Mann, Time Regained by Proust, The Years by Virginia Woolf, and The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa. For this article, I will present an aspect of my research, namely the spiritual and existential implications of the hero’s death penalty in the novels of Tolstoy and Schnitzler. I will also demonstrate how The Death of Ivan Ilych represents not only Tolstoy’s spiritual legacy, but his literary legacy as well. Furthermore, I will discuss how Schnitzler’s first novel, Dying, sheds, as Françoise Derré says in The work of Arthur Schnitzler: Viennese imaging and human problems, “essential light on the idea that Schnitzler has conceived about death” (Derré 1966: 398, my translation).
This dissertation addresses the concurrent revival of experimental writing and linguistic skepticism in West Germany and Austria after 1945, concentrating on the work of Helmut Heißenbüttel, Konrad ...Bayer, Peter Handke, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. While the immediate postwar years gave rise to a germanophone literature that was largely intolerant of formal experimentation—due to widespread adherence to a neo-Sartrean model of littérature engagée and a restorationist return to classical form—certain writers began to oppose this aesthetic conservatism in the early fifties. Influenced by international avant-garde developments—from concrete poetry to the nouveau roman—they developed a new form of German writing that actively experimented with literary and linguistic form. Their work was often accompanied by a sophisticated theoretical critique of language, connecting back via Wittgenstein and Whorf to the turn-of-the-century Sprachkrise and the writings of Mauthner and Hofmannsthal. I aim to offer an analysis of this language-skeptical approach to writing, showing how it was employed to create a cultural space for avant-garde literature in the postwar period—presenting experimental writing as a legitimate intellectual endeavor with tangible social value, despite its running contrary to prevalent models of politically engaged or formally conservative writing. Against the common literary-historical view of the sixties as the decade of the "politicization of literature," I aim to show the existence of an alternate track of "linguistic aesthetics" propagated almost exclusively by writers of experimental literature, developing in the fifties and extending through the sixties and beyond. For these writers, a skeptical and analytical treatment of language became the necessary starting point for any progressive literature. I also aim to show how later writers like Handke and Brinkmann came to see this linguistic skepticism as en encumbering limitation of literary possibility. In their early-seventies work, which is often grouped with the movement of New Subjectivity, these writers adopt a pragmatic model of language as a flawed but functional tool for the communication of subjective experience, resulting in a writing that continues to explore the ambiguous link between word and world.
An interest in the concept of ornament, and in the range of artistic practices traditionally called ornamental, has long been recognized as a feature of the literary and artistic culture of the ...Viennese fin de siècle, also called Jugendstil. In my interdisciplinary dissertation I argue that we can speak of a foundational epistemological structure aptly described as “ornamental structure,” which finds expression in poetry and drama, in aesthetics and art historical inquiry, in political thought, and, indeed, in psychoanalysis. Ornament addresses a central issue of philosophy, namely the relationship between matter and form or, put differently, between depth and surface, which is rethought in a fundamental way in the second half of the 19th century. In Chapter One, I show how the concept of ornament first entered scientific and philosophical debates with the emergence of aesthetics as an academic field in the 18th century. The chapter traces its history from this first appearance up to its revaluation in mid-19th century. I show that ornament had always had a liminal and ambiguous place within aesthetic thought. I do so by exploring the role of ornament in changes in both the life sciences and art history, making use of the examples of the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel and the art historian Alois Riegl. Ornaments come to be considered as creative since they are thought to highlight the movement, variation, and creation of life itself in a way that depicts life by abstracting from natural phenomena. They, thus, are more than just a matter of taste or regalia. I argue that we see here the emergence of a new epistemological structure, one which throws light on the relationship between art and life at the end of the 19th century. In Chapter Two, I investigate this altered understanding of the relationship between art and life in a discussion of Hofmannsthal’s lyric drama The Death of Titian (1892), one of the first examples of Jugendstil literature in the Austro-Hungarian context. The second part of this chapter investigates the role ornament plays for Vienna’s artists who break with historicism in the Viennese Secession movement. Chapter Three addresses early 20th century representations of the psyche. It explores ornamental narrative strategies in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Hofmannsthal’s Märchen der 672. Nacht ( Fairytale of the 672th night 1895) and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900). I investigate the ways in which the understanding of unconscious desire as a labyrinth ornamental surface structure is a central concept for psychoanalysis. Chapter Four explores a set of narrative and cultural strategies that, in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, seek to reimagine the community of Habsburgian subjects after the end of the monarchy. In my analysis of Hofmannsthal’s tragic drama Der Turm ( The Tower 1925/27) I show that the dichotomy of the monarch’s two bodies is replaced by the monist model of what I come to call, the “king’s ornamental body”, which is imagined to overcome the split between a cultural body and the—no longer existing—physical body of the monarch. By heightening awareness of how the dualism of life and form is replaced by an aesthetic monism in the epistemological structure of ornament, my dissertation places the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal within the context of a series of broader changes in art, the natural sciences, discourses on the psyche, and the aesthetic-political sphere. The project seeks to form a valuable interdisciplinary link between fields such as Austrian/Habsburg studies, literature and art history, interart studies as well as 19th and 20 th century investigations of aesthetic theory and intellectual history.
The aim of this thesis is to analyse the understanding of revolutionary violence as depicted in two canonical dramas of the German revolutionary theater: Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod and Ernst ...Toller's Masse Mensch. I argue that both Büchner and Toller approach the question of revolutionary violence symmetrically but from opposite angles: Büchner by questioning violence and Toller by questioning non-violence. In the first chapter, I outline Walter Benjamin's theory of the ‘real state of exception' in the context of his engagement with Carl Schmitt, as well as the relevant aspects of three canonic theories of revolutionary violence (Sorel, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon), which I then apply to the representation of violence in Dantons Tod and Masse Mensch. In the second chapter I try to reconstruct the political views and the revolutionary background of the two authors. In the first part of the third chapter, I then interpret both Dantons Tod and Masse Mensch as a ‘real state of exception' according to Benjamin. In the second part, I then analyse the representation of revolutionary violence in both dramas with the help of the three theories of violence outlined. Among the different forms of revolutionary violence I examine are: the juxtaposition of force and power (Sorel), and progressive, regressive, internal and therapeutic violence (Merleau-Ponty, Fanon). The thesis concludes with a discussion of the utopia of non-violence as it is also depicted in both dramas.
