Elisabeth Bronfen

Death and Representation

Death is a subject of increasing interest in virtually all academic disciplines, yet there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the representation of death in literary contexts. Death and Representation offers a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary essays, rich in cultural perspectives but sharing a relatively common vocabulary. It provides models for a number of interrelated approaches-including psychoanalytic, feminist, and historical-with essays by prominent and promising scholars. Contributors are Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Regina Barreca, Elisabeth Bronfen, Carol Christ, Sander Gilman, Sarah Webster Goodwin, Margaret Higonnet, Regina Janes, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Ronald Schleifer, Charles Segal, and Garrett Stewart.

Femme Fatale--Negotiations of Tragic Desire

The article uses Stanley Cavells claim that tragedy be thought of in terms of avoiding recognition of the other as a way to discuss a genre - film noir - which is usually ignored by tragic theorists. A close reading of Billy Wilders classic film Double Indemnity serves to present a way to think tragedy not just as a narrowly defined dramatic genre, but as a mode or structure of feeling, with the femme fatale as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragic sensibility. For in the world of film noir she elicits fantasies of omnipotence, supporthing the heros desire to stave off knowledge of his own fallibility at all costs. At the same time she performs a tragic acceptance precisely by assuming responsibility for her fate, because she comes to discover freedom in her embrace of the inevitability of causation. This article thus claims the femme fatale is not merely a stereotype, symptom or catchphrase for dangerous femininity but rather the subject of her narrative, an authentic modern heroine.

Home in Hollywood : the imaginary geography of cinema

Prologue--Out of the LibraryIntroduction: Not Master in His Own House1. Uncanny Appropriations2. Home--Theres No Place Like It3. Seduction of Departing4. Hybrid Home5. The Enigma of Homecoming6. Sustaining Dislocation

Dorothy Richardson's art of memory : space, identity, text

Introduction Part I Actual Material Spaces 1. Locations of passage and habitation 2. The spirit of the place 3. Three modes of emplacement: Absorption in space, movement through space, contemplation space 4. In search of lost space Part II Metaphorical spaces 5. World-making as a cognitive process 6. The spatiality of psychic states Part III Textual Space - Spatial Textuality 7. The space of literature 8. When the tapestry hangs complete: March Moonlight Appendix: Critical literature on Dorothy Richardson Bibliography

The Language of Hysteria: A Misappropriation of the Master Narratives

Bronfen discusses the language of hysteria in conjunction with recent discussions of ethics, notably in the sense that the hysteric gesture of misappropriating a grand narrative such as humanism confronts the manner in which discussions of gender might traverse alterity without effacing or occluding it.

Gothic Renaissance: A reassessment

This collection of essays by experts in Renaissance and Gothic studies tracks the lines of connection between Gothic sensibilities and the discursive network of the Renaissance. The texts covered encompass poetry, epic narratives, ghost stories, prose dialogues, political pamphlets and Shakespeares texts, read alongside those of other playwrights. The authors show that the Gothic sensibility addresses subversive fantasies of transgression, be this in regard to gender (troubling stable notions of masculinity and femininity), in regard to social orders (challenging hegemonic, patriarchal or sovereign power), or in regard to disciplinary discourses (dictating what is deemed licit and what illicit or deviant). They relate these issues back to the early modern period as a moment of transition, in which categories of individual, gendered, racial and national identity began to emerge, and connect the religious and the pictorial turn within early modern textual production to a reassessment of Gothic culture.

Hybrid Spaces in Antony and Cleopatra

Bronfen reads Antony and Cleopatra as a tragedy of hybrid spaces. Emphasizing the carnivalesque way in which Cleopatra embodies Egypt, Bronfen explores how cross-dressing and gendered masquerade blend with the concept of the king’s two bodies expressed in the duality of body natural and body politic, particularly resonant during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Exploiting and confusing this duality, Cleopatra throws open a theatrical space wherever she goes, and conversely, her embodiment on stage, and the dramatic connection between the Egyptian and the English queen, opens up a hybrid space that is both historical and mythical, including, and at the same time going beyond the geopolitical dimension. Finally, Cleopatra’s ‘self-designed apotheosis’ introduces a final moment of hybridity, creating a space of textual regeneration.

Monumental Cleopatra: Hollywood’s Epic Film as Historical Re-imagination

Abstract Taking Nietzsche’s discussion of monumental and critical history writing as its theoretical point of departure, this article discusses the double voicing and self-reflexivity of the Hollywood epic film. Even as Scott’s Gladiator (2005), DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) and Mankiewicz’ Cleopatra (1963) bring grand events of the ancient world to the screen, they appropriate the past for the present. The excessive visual style typical for Hollywood’s monumentalism, furthermore, explicitly foregrounds the cinematic medium, exceeding and transcending any verifiable past so as to produce an affective, visceral historical re-imagination. At issue is a re-appraisal of the past through its subsequent cinematic recyclings.

Männliche Sammelwut, weibliche Neugierde: Blaubarts Wunde(r)kammer

Zusammenfassung Das Blaubart-Thema erfährt in diesem Beitrag eine breit angelegte Untersuchung ausgehend von Perraults Märchen bis hin zu Freuds und Benjamins Analysen sowie Vergleichen mit Miltons Paradise Lost und Hitchcocks Filmen. Das Märchen ist nicht nur als Allegorie weiblicher Wissenslust, gespeist aus ärmlicher Enge und Langeweile, und daraus folgender tödlicher Bestrafung aus männlicher Perspektive zu lesen, sondern auch als ein psychosexuelles Sinnbild weiblicher Sexualautonomie, deren Ergründung und sündliche Befriedigung durch die Schlüsselübergabe geradezu provoziert wird. Blaubarts Todes gesamtkunstwerk zerstückelter Frauenleichen wird der neugierigen Braut zum memento mori, dessen Offenbarung das eigene Schicksal heraufbeschwört, indem die Mordsinstallation von ihr enthüllt und Blaubart als Frauenmörder enttarnt wird. Gerade als verbotener Ort stimuliert die ‚Wunde(r)kammer‘ nicht nur das Verlangen in sie einzudringen, um ihr das schrecklich-schöne Geheimnis zu entreißen, sondern sie fungiert auch als Anreiz zur Transgression des Verbotes, zu jeglichem Risiko bereit, jenseits von Erregung, Leidenschaft und Verschwendungssucht. Abstract Starting out with Perrault’s tale, the present large-scale study of the Bluebeard theme includes Freud’s and Benjamin’s analyses as well as comparisons with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hitchcock’s movies. The tale cannot only to be read as an allegory of female thirst for knowledge, caused by meanly constriction and boredom, and its consequences, namely punishment by death which she deserves from a male point of view; it is also a psychosexual ensign of female sexual autonomy, the exploration and sinful satisfaction of which is downrightly provoked by handing over the key to her. For the curious bride, Bluebeard’s lethal artwork of dismembered female bodies becomes a memento mori, conjuring up the fate that would have awaited her, while she reveals the murderous installation and unmasks Bluebeard as a ripper. It is precisely as a forbidden place that the ‘wondrous chamber’ not only stimulates the desire to intrude in order to snatch away the secret which is as horrible as it is beautiful, but also functions as an incentive to transgress the interdiction, with a readiness to bear any risk, beyond excitement, passion and squandermania. Résumé Prenant comme point de départ le conte de Perrault, cette étude prend en compte les analyses de Freud et de Benjamin aussi bien que des comparaisons avec Le Paradis perdu de Milton et les films de Hitchcock. Au-delà d’une lecture en tant qu’allégorie d’une soif de savoir féminine qui se nourrit d’une étroitesse minable et d’ennui, et de ses conséquences, la peine de mort qu’elle mérite d’un point de vue masculin, il est également un emblème psychosexuel de l’autonomie sexuelle féminine dont l’exploration et la satisfaction peccables sont directement provoquées par la remise de la clé. Pour la mariée curieuse, l’oeuvre d’art meurtrière que la Barbe Bleue a composée à partir de corps féminins dépecés devient un memento mori, en évocant une destinée qui aurait due être la sienne, lorsqu’elle dévoile l’installation meurtrière et révèle que la Barbe Bleue est un assassin de femmes. C’est précisément en tant que lieu interdit que la ‹ chambre merveilleuse › ne stimule pas seulement le désir de s’y introduire afin de lui arracher son secret qui est aussi horrible qu’il est beau, il encourage également la transgression de l’interdiction, en assumant tout risque, au-delà de l’excitation, de la passion et de la prodigalité.

Night and the Uncanny

The night is a double of the day, a comment on its activities, a countersite. In most cultures, the setting of the sun has always been connected with the advent of a different way of thinking and behaving. As our sight diminishes, other senses — notably our faculties of hearing and of the imagination — come to be increased. Our sense of distance and measure changes, the contours of the persons or objects we meet become blurred, we encounter a sense of disorientation, which can be either fascinating or threatening. In contrast to its appearance in daylight, the world surrounding us is harder to characterize; it shifts between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The danger potentially lurking in the night has, furthermore, always inspired tales of superstitious powers beyond those ruled by diurnal reason. Apart from thieves, arsonists and conspirators, ghosts, vampires and the devil himself seek the protection of darkness to pursue their unholy goals. At the same time, precisely because the night requires a higher degree of vigilance than the day, its darkness affords revelations. The night is the right time for the divine visions of early Christian mystics, for encountering the spirits of one’s departed loved ones, for telling ghost stories around a fire or for seeing in one’s dreams things one’s conscious mind would censor during the day.