Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lantz, Lori Ann

Titel

Widerstand/Gegenstand: 19th-century “living statues” in literature in German and the emergence of cinematic spectatorship and of psychoanalysis

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• During the 19th century, a number of German-speaking authors wrote significant texts that are variations on a traditional theme known as “Venus and the Ring.” This study focuses on six of these accounts: Das Marmorbild (Joseph von Eichendorff, 1814), Der Sandmann , (E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1815) “Frau Venus,” (Franz von Gaudy, 1838), Venus im Pelz (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1870), “Die Totden sind unersättlich” (Sacher-Masoch, 1875), and the early 20th-century Gradiva (Wilhelm Jensen, 1903). The tenets of Idealism as developed in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century invested statues with rich associations that consciously or unconsciously inform the retellings of this story. In the aesthetic theories of Kant (Kritik der Urteilskraft), Schiller ( Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen) and Hegel (Ästhetik, Einleitung in die Ästhetik) statues serve as locations for investigating the formation of the human subject and the boundaries between the subject and the external world. Part of this investigation involves a problematizing of the physical interaction of man and his environment and a corresponding valorization of the sense of sight. The Germanophone accounts of “Venus and the Ring” popular in the 19th century strongly exhibit these same tendencies. By blurring the distinctions between such categories as “animate/inanimate,” “subject/object,” and “self/other” on which the sense of the self depends, the relationship of the male subject to his physical environment is characterized as both permeable and erotically charged. The protagonists of these tales who survive their encounters with the animated statue employ a strategy that anticipates the practices of film viewership, in that they learn to view the external world as a moving image that conveys significance but contains no real content. Freud, in turn, subsequently invoked the living statue and its associations in his psychoanalytic writings, especially in Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens “Gradiva” and in his essay on the uncanny, “Das Unheimliche.” In Freud's texts, the living statue serves as a metaphor for psychoanalysis itself, and Freud's very different reception of the statues in the texts examined here reveals ambiguities and contradictions within his own conception of the psychoanalytic method.