Browsing by Subject "visual culture"

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    Experiencing the Otherworldly: Magazine Reading and Illustrations of Orientalist Domestic Space in the United States, 1880-1920
    (2016-12) Truitt, Andrea
    “Experiencing the Otherworldly” analyzes images of exotic furnishings and interiors—magazine illustrations, advertisements, and photographs—in order to show the ways in which turn-of-the-century white upper- and middle-class American women may have engaged with exoticism. I focus specifically on images produced between 1880 and 1920 that depict styles that evoke North Africa and the Middle East. Employing close visual and textual analysis of four decades of American taste-making periodicals, I have discerned a noticeable increase in illustrations and discussion of exoticized interiors, especially in the 1890s. Noticing this decisive shift through exhaustive review, I anchor my analysis in the illustrations found in The Decorator and Furnisher (1882-1897) and The Art Amateur (1879-1903), because they exemplify this increasing interest. I argue that women used magazine illustrations of “Persian,” “Moorish,” and “Turkish” interiors as a means of participating in the public discourse of imperialism through the private consumption of images. The sensory stimulation that women experienced through viewing illustrations of exotic interiors created an affective participation in imperialism. This same sensory stimulation also allows us to think about the means by which magazine readers accessed the architectural space found within the illustration. Images of exotic domestic interiors are vehicles that visually transport the viewer out of their mundane circumstances and into an elaborate, exoticized world. Immersive engagement is a form of reading that, through the imaginative response to illustrations, permits a form of travel without leaving the spaces of everyday life, which included the home, the department store, the seat on the subway/trolley, or the front porch. To formulate my interpretative theory, I draw upon scholarship from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s that addresses: the perception of art (Alois Riegl and Bernard Berenson), everyday life studies (Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre), and phenomenology (Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre). I use chapters one and two to contextualize magazine reading and imagined transportation into illustrations of exotic interiors by exploring the representation of otherness at the nationally significant, and culturally catalytic, 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, juxtaposing this with a study of how white women could use exotic goods as a means of self-expression. Chapter one, “Coming (Home) to the Midway Middle East: Familiarity and Domestication,” addresses the exposition, namely Cairo Street, housed in the exposition’s entertainment district, the Midway Plaisance. I argue that its architectural spaces, were similar to what visitors already knew in their own hometowns, and thus visitors could control their exposure to otherness through consumer choices. Chapter two, “Seeing the Interior: Consumerism and the Exoticization of Self,” takes up the notion of how the exotic came home, namely through purchase of consumer goods and interior furnishings. I assert that the ease and availability of exotic goods allowed white women to demonstrate a feminized form of imperialism, through the pastime of shopping. The acquisition of exotic goods into the home also served a second purpose: it was a way for white women to intimately engage with the exotic, and express something of their psychological interiority through self-othering. This dual understanding of women as both imperialistic and Other demonstrates the contradictory social placement value that white women held in American culture. In establishing a cultural and visual connection between exotic furnishings and female consumers, I then focus specifically on illustrations of exoticized interiors found in decorating- and women’s magazines in the second half of the dissertation. Chapters three and four assert the importance of the visual representations of exotic spaces in the everyday life of female readers. In chapter three, “Magazine Reading and the Material Culture of Escape,” I assert that the practice of magazine reading was a form of escape from women’s everyday environments, especially powerful as reading was a socially-acceptable form of leisure. In considering reading as retreat alongside the characterization of exotic interiors as offering complete relaxation, I argue that looking at illustrations of exotic interiors in particular could stimulate the mind to explore, through the imagination, the interiors depicted. In chapter four, “Text, Image, and Immersion into Illustrated Interiors,” I analyze this imagined exploration. When a reader enters reverie, she explores the two-dimensional image as an imagined three-dimensional interior. Both the image and accompanying text stimulate the senses, thus activating the reader’s imagination in order to explore the illustrated space.
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    Homo Mediaticus: Immigrants, Identity, and (Tele)Visual Media in Contemporary Francophone Literature
    (2016-09) Bates, Severine
    This dissertation examines the figure of the Immigrant in light of the practical and symbolic role played by the mass media, and especially television and its images, in the processes of identity construction and socialization, as problematized in several Francophone North African immigrant novels. It aims to shed light on the ways in which the figure of the Immigrant has been “mediated” in novels such as Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les raisins de la galère, Youssouf Elalamy’s Les clandestins or Faiza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain. These novels fall mainly into three literary categories: Beur Literature, Banlieue literature and Illiterature (Hakim Abderrezak) which focuses on the phenomenon of clandestine migration (Hrig) in the Mediterranean basin. Products of what I call the “génération du visible,” these novels offer ground for reflection on the political, psychological, social, cultural and, ultimately, ontological effects of the media’s obsessive representations of this social category. Arguing for a new model of subjectivity for the Immigrant grounded on his relationship with the mass media, I posit that, in these novels and more generally in the collective imagination, the Immigrant—embodied by the Beur, Jeune de Banlieue or Harraga—emerges not only as a constructed figure of alterity and subalternity, but also as a Homo Mediaticus (Massimo Ragnedda) born from the interstices of images and discourses, and of the virtual and the real. I also contend that as a Homo Mediaticus, the Immigrant is both a product of media representation and a media user whose existence, subjectivity, and agency depend on his visibility (as object of the Gaze) and on the performative and meaningful act of “seeing” (as agent and user of technology). In novels like Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain, the Immigrant's use of media technologies and of his imagination allows him to mediate his experiences in and with society, to control his “droit de regard,” and to create new identities that are more subversive and transcultural in nature than fixed or unique.
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    The Revolutionary Task of Cinema: Modernism and Mass Culture in Shanghai and Buenos Aires
    (2019-05) Sedzielarz, Aleksander
    This dissertation reconstructs the interconnected cultural histories of film and literature in Shanghai and Buenos Aires in the period 1927-1937. Through readings of previously untranslated texts on film form and film technology by Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), Mao Dun (pen name of Shen Yanbing, 1896-1981), and Xia Yan (pen name of Shen Naixi, 1900-1995), I identify a movement in cinepoetics common to Latin America and East Asia that mobilized local popular culture for global working-class political goals. My research investigates into key points in the history of the encounter between cinema and literature in these two cities and links internationalist movements in revolutionary politics with the vibrant film cultures emerging in these two cities—as seen through the eyes of each writer. Through a close textual, visual, and auditory analysis of film clips, film reviews, film-poems, reportage, film-inspired fiction narrative, screenplays, and soundtracks, each case study tracks the work of these writers as they participated in a transpacific intellectual network of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics during the period of rising fascism, class conflict, socialist solidarity, and political upheaval in the years prior to the Second World War. My study finds that their experiments with film pushed the boundaries of traditional writing forms. Moreover, in developing new critical practices of viewing and listening to cinema Storni, Arlt, Mao Dun, and Xia Yan each contributed to a politically engaged internationalist current of cinematic modernism. During this brief period of resistance to the globalized dominance of Hollywood entertainment commodities, each of these writers exemplified the strengthening of cultural movement based in cinema, which presented the cinematic experience as grounds for a renewed modern social experience with the potential to radically disrupt sociopolitical formations of class, nation, and state. As a collaboratively produced and collectively consumed cultural form, cinema presented each of these writers with a means for reinventing political thought in ways that embraced the intricacies of urban life in cities on the periphery of globalized circuits of capital. Linked by an attention to film as a politically volatile fusion of mass art and mass spectacle—an attention that, at key moments, gave these writers common cause in resisting cultural exports that extended the reach of European and American empire—my study discovers these radical intellectuals as leaders in a transpacific cultural front that ultimately aimed at establishing cinema as a mass art that could unify worldwide movements against the capitalist exploitation of the working classes.