Author: Alys X. George
Publisher:
Size: 74.95 MB
Category : Human figure in art
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Body Culture books, "Body / Culture: Viennese Modernism and the Physical Aesthetic" is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the body in fin-de-siede Vienna. It investigates the human body as a polyvalent nexus of aesthetic, popular, social, and scientific representations, and examines how the body served as a screen onto which an array of modernist Utopian desires was projected. Can "presence" be created, "immediacy" enhanced, "naturalness" recovered, the "authenticity" of lived experience adequately expressed? The fascination with the corporeal in Viennese modernism affirms a belief in a kind of "somatic utopia," which seemed to offer answers to these questions in an era of unsettling change. Despite having been largely overlooked in scholarship on Vienna 1900, this notion was present across a surprising range of fields--including theater, pantomime, modern dance, and silent film; ethnographic exhibitions, life reform movements, literature, and photography; cabaret, puppetry, and physical culture. "Body / Culture" reflects this heterogeneity and brings together an unorthodox constellation of figures, both familiar and lesser known, from the fin-de-siede Viennese cultural field. Recognizing the role of the corporeal in the aesthetic production of Viennese modernism points up the shortcomings of the neat conceptual categories prevalent in scholarship on turn-of-the-century 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-desiede 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 Prodromos 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 aesthetic production of Viennese modernism. Beginning with a look at the puppet as archetype in theoretical texts by Heinrich von Kleist and Edward Gordon Craig and in dramas by Arthur Schnitzler and others, this chapter analyzes the re-emergence of marionettes and rod puppets on fin-de-siecle Viennese stages. Possessing a remarkable range of motion and expressive detail, the puppet bodies of Richard Teschner's Figurentheoter in turn intersected with the Viennese Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) of Gertrud Bodenwieser and Hilde Holgerfrom the 1920s and 1930s. The reciprocal influences between puppet theater and stage performance are also present in the case of life-size dolls, such as Oskar Kokoschka's infamous Alma Mahler doll and Cilli Wang's understudied stage doubles, both of which gain cogency when viewed in the context of expressionist drama and cabaret performance. Together, the three paradigms of the body I propose--animation, representation, and simulation--highlight the centrality of the corporeal as a reference point in the intellectual, cultural, and social fabric of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Inspired by recent interdisciplinary work that falls under the rubric of cultural studies, the project's methodology fuses literary studies' and art history's close readings of texts, images, and objects with a historical inquiry's eye to the particularities of time, place, and people. It also incorporates elements of film and media studies, dance history, and contemporary performance studies concerning questions of the body and corporeality. Set against the backdrop of recent scholarship in modernist studies at large by Sara Danius, Mary Gluck, Michael North, Vanessa R. Schwartz, and others, this cultural history links common discursive patterns of the era to their aesthetic and social articulations. By investigating the role of the body in fin-de-siecle Viennese culture and beyond, the scope and focus of this dissertation transcend the ubiquitous Vienna 1900 myth and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Viennese modernism.
