Literature
Cinema figures as the crucial site where the anthropological drive to grasp the world in images finds a media outlet. Media in this sense are eternally constituted and re-constituted psychocultural ‘prosthetics’ giving space to sensation, emotion, and thought. This process of medialization condenses and sediments in media artifacts, embodying human experience in an externalized form and inviting our aesthetic engagement. Cinema seen from this perspective consists in a coupling of three anthropologically crucial domains of existence, which assume the shape of layers of medialization.
This project will start with an examination of the cinematic transformation of external physical and social reality. The testing grounds for this will be the strain of sociocritical U.S. horror cinema, the analogous melodrama (where everyday experience becomes horrific), and the movie adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels.
As recorded motion adds both significance and force to the expressive gestures and poses of the human body, transitional performance states loom large in a medium which gives meaningful forms to the self in action. It is the highly ambiguous nature of physical interactions that sets the parameters for the second chapter, which turns to the cinematic duality of dancing and fighting.
The fascination with seeing oneself from the outside is the third crucial domain this thesis will explore. Cinema provides the material structure for the staging of imaginary processes of projection and identification as compelling apparitions of the self. The claim that the self is in dire need not only of being manufactured, but also of being staged is explored in the final set of film analyses, which focus on the cinema of Werner Herzog.
By way of conclusion, the tension between the ‘reality of pictures’ and ‘pictures of reality’ (a notion explored by Ludwig Pfeiffer across various contexts) is transmuted by the assertion that instances of cinematic experience embody perceptual thought.
Europe’s New Chinese Literature deals with literature — poetry, theater and prose — by authors of Chinese origin using German or French as modes of expression.
Only in the last decade the majority of their works was published and became visible to a larger audience, with Dai Sijie and Shan Sa in France and Luo Lingyuan in Germany. The thesis attempts the first comprehensive analysis of this literature using a comparative approach. It scrutinizes the discursive strategies with which the authors of this group position themselves in the literary field. The strategies differ insofar as the writers for example adopt Western stereotypes of China in their works or want to function as cultural ambassadors for China.
In the seven chapters which comprise this work, the movement of zoomorphic or animalistic imagery is shown to be present throughout the waves of immigration to the United States as it is evidenced in illustrations taken from the respective waves. In this aim, the zoomorphic imagery is shown to be consistently present in illustrations, not only pictorially but also in regards to the language used in the accompanying texts and titles attached to the illustrations. Furthermore, in order to support the drawn conclusions from each wave which prove the migration of zoomorphic imagery throughout the various waves, a historic review is offered for each major chapter containing relevant information on depicted events and immigrant groups.
Overall methodologies used herein include, Panofsky’s iconographic analysis in which a three-tiered reading of images is undertaken in order to isolate icons which transport meaning to the viewer, both contemporarily and contemporaneously, via their careful placement in relation to the scopic regimes at the time of creation and also currently. Additionally, the use of language both as text to be read regarding the illustrations and text included in the illustrations themselves in the forms of captions, titles, etc., will be subjected to discourse analysis and the degree to which the images and texts work together to create a unique imagery that is observable throughout the historic taxonomies is determined. The work then proves that considering historic events, the interpretive elements of the imagery are not contemporary reimaginings but relate closely to contemporaneous scopic regime interpretations that are traceable up until and including the continuing debate on immigration.
The discourse analyses follow those guidelines developed by Foucault and Gee and especially poignant here is the notion of the discursive formation and the undefined ‘more’ that result from formative aspects of discourse at its inception. Discourse thereby contributes to the tracing of the imagery as it is possible to track also the phraseology used in relationship to immigrants during varying timeframes in the United States’ immigration history and to review how, and to which degree, that language has morphed in relation to its inclusion of animalistic elements. It is also in the discourse analyses in which the zoomorphic imagery supersedes the level of visuality and enters concretely into imagery. That concretization is explored here as a discursive formation, and yet this work proves that this does not involve a stagnation of imagery as there is a driving force which is recognizable in the successive waves. The zoomorphic aspects are examined insomuch as the imagery is compared to animal imagery, anatomy and behavior.
These seven chapters prove that there is indeed an ever-present zoomorphic imagery throughout the waves of immigration to the United States and such an endeavor has not yet been undertaken in an academic context. The comprehensive work of Roger Daniels offers much of the backbone to the historic methodology used, and the contribution of his corpus is reviewed in the literary review chapter which gives an up-to-date account of the state of research in regards to this particular enquiry. As there is very little research combining these multiple analyses in regards to American immigrant imagery, scholarly material has been used from the field of Human-Animal Studies as this growing discipline encompasses similar approaches to the examination and appropriation of animals in human civilization even if not exactly matching to the research aims and findings of this work.
An introduction, outlining the target questions and the basic approach of the text is followed by a literature review and a methodology section wherein the various methods that are used to trace the imagery are outlined and the reasons for their selection as integral are stated. Next, there are three major chapters which are based on the time period that each wave covers (a taxonomy which is explained in the methodology chapter), with each chapter containing an introduction to the illustrations, the historic background on them, the pictorial analyses and the discourse analysis of the wave. For each chapter there is also a conclusion which presents the findings of that particular chapter and leads into the next. Finally, at the end an overall conclusion is given which functions to not only summarize the work as a whole but also to reiterate the proof of the use of zoomorphic imagery throughout the immigration waves. Also, the conclusion contains markers which might direct further scholarly research on this research topic and poses questions which have sprung out of the research contained herein.
Overall, Migrating Imageries: zoomorphic depictions of immigrants in American illustrations serves as a springboard from which the relationship between zoomorphic imagery and the depiction of the immigrant in American illustrations (and also in the general visuality) can be based, which could consequently lead to furthered academic research in this area. This work joins the ongoing development of the academic field of Human-Animal Studies and contributes to the larger study of American visual culture.
This dissertation seeks to examine the rise of interest in American travel narratives and increasing Orientalist representations on direct encounter with the Orient within the following six immediately popular and influential narratives David Porters Constantinople and Its Environs by an American (1835), Nathaniel P. Willis Pencillings by the Way (1836), John Lloyd Stephens Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrea, and the Holy Land (1837), and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838), Bayard Taylors The Land of the Saracen, or Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain (1854), and Mark Twains Traveling with the Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims Progress. The study traces 19th century American exceptionalist discourses in these narratives via categories of latent Orientalism and argue for a by no means uniform but an indigenous 19th century latent American Orientalism prevalent in these six texts. The analysis also draws on the substantial influence of the journey narrative both as a motif and as a genre in the 19th century American literary scene and its historically embedded impact. The work treats the discursive preferences of the authors as conscious strategies or subliminal reflexes in the national identity formation processes that these narratives partake in.
Apart from the author's personal interest in phenomena dealing with the construction, negotiation, maintenance, manipulation and reification of personal and public identity, this work is based on consistent recent confirmations of masks not only being 'alive and well' in popular culture as well as in (social) media, but in fact articulating socio-political power in ways not unlike those of their archaic prototypes. Therefore, one aim pursued herein is the tracing of an evolution of masks in the Western collective consciousness, across several outstanding epochs and genres, which we have linked together in order to better visualise performance, reception and interaction trends leading up to the present. Another aim of this research is the introduction of new patterns and categories as conceptual tools for further investigation, beginning with defining the Mask Metempsychosis process itself and discussing its three phases in specific contexts of cultural history, as indicated above. Thirdly, mask-wearing archetypes of folklore and more recent fiction will be analysed throughout, together with outstanding characters they have engendered, based on the previously set two layers of reception. The reader shall thus gain further insight into masks' articulation of power and aesthetics as part of the complex everyday and ceremonial negotiations of private and public, self and community, as well as of the socio-political with the religious and the psychological.
