The Art of Watching

Autor(en)

Gianna Zocco

Abstrakt

Since Romanticism, authors frequently use the literary motif of the window for discussing metafictional questions. While texts like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Des Vetters Eckfenster (1822) describe the male gaze at the woman in order to construct models of superior, self-reliant authorship, contemporary novels like Peter Handke’s Die Wiederholung (1986) and Siri Hustvedt’s The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996) are influenced by the deconstruction of traditional authorship in the context of subjectivism, post-structuralism and gender studies. Yet, these texts make broad use of windows for addressing metafictional questions. Considering the window a “mise en reflet”, whose metafictional potential derives from the similarities between ‘the art of watching’ and the art of writing and reading, my analysis proposes two parameters, namely objectivity/subjectivity and mimesis/poiesis, for classifying the various metafictional window-scenarios in contemporary literature.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft

Journal

Trans. Revue de littérature générale et comparée

Publikationsdatum

2013

ÖFOS 2012

602053 Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/bf4050a8-2874-4e72-8b18-149878ba5097