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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Body/Culture: Viennese Modernism and the Physical Aesthetic.

Body/Culture: Viennese Modernism and the Physical Aesthetic.

George, Alys X.

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Fiction Anthologies

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ISBN10: 1243622563
ISBN13: 9781243622563
Publisher: Proquest Umi Dissertation Pub
Pages: 260
Weight: 1.04
Height: 0.55 Width: 7.44 Depth: 9.69
Language: English
Body/Culture: Viennese Modernism and the Physical Aesthetic is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the body in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Ultimately, this study strives to revise the canon of Viennese modernism by transcending the Vienna 1900 myth. Chapter one introduces the discourses surrounding modernism/modernity, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the body, chronicling the interdisciplinary methodological foundations that underlie this study. Taking up the challenges of Steven Beller and Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, among others, to rethink Vienna 1900 and move beyond the Schorskean paradigm put forth in Carl E. Schorske's influential study, the chapter also posits a framework for a more complex and inclusive view of Viennese modernism than prior studies. This chapter roots the turn-of-the-century fascination with the corporeal in concurrent trends that included the physical culture craze; advances in medicine and the natural sciences; philosophical and epistemological debates; processes of modernity, modernization, and industrialization; and the emerging primacy of visual and popular culture. The remainder of the dissertation is structured around three tropes of modernist body culture: animation, representation, and simulation. Chapter two investigates modernist discourse on body language and gesture in Vienna as framed by the critique of language so central to that city's cultural and philosophical ferment. To authors such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bela Balazs and dancers like Grete Wiesenthal, the body seemed to offer an alternate form of communication more immediate, universal, and intelligible than spoken or written language. In this context, changing notions of and the increasing importance of the performer's body led to a push within the dramatic arts toward physical theater. The revival of pantomime among Viennese authors and directors such as Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Max Reinhardt, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hermann Bahr, and Max Mell documents this tendency. The development of free dance in Vienna---largely through Wiesenthal, the foremost Viennese dancer of her time---provided new creative impulses for writers like Hofmannsthal, who penned numerous libretti for dances and hybrid dance-pantomimes. The gestural principles underlying pantomime and modern dance subsequently became important templates for film actors in the first decades of silent film. Here, Viennese film theories by Balazs and Hofmannsthal from the early 1920s---examined alongside Hofmannsthal's understudied screenplays---bear witness to a heightened belief in the expressive power of the body in motion. Chapter three looks at identity construction in turn-of-the-century Vienna vis-a-vis the body of the cultural Other and the Self. It reads the vogue for Volkerschauen (ethnographic exhibitions) and the Lebensreformbewegung (life reform movement) around 1900 together. Both trends hinge on the staging of the human body and posit surprisingly homologous concepts of natural and ideal bodies that act as foils for the anxieties of modern society. The reciprocal relationship between fin-de-siecle popular culture and social concepts of ideal bodies is further underscored by visual imaging and collecting practices. In concert, these phenomena generate a new context for Peter Altenberg's texts Ashantee and Prodroˇmoˇs and for his obsessive collecting of postcards and photographs. Altenberg's engagement with photography demonstrates how the photographed body was appropriated and recontextualized to construct self-identity. Chapter four examines the use of three-dimensional simulacra of the human body (marionettes, puppets, and dolls) in the...

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