Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement: Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut

Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement: Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut 1 I use the neologism “gynomorphic,” which is the specifically female form of “anthropomorphic,” because in most nineteenth-century versions of the story the inanimate figure is female. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /292 This overview perhaps requires some explanation and qualification. First, by “literature” I mean primarily prose fiction. The short story was the most prevalent narrative form of the nineteenth-century fantastic, practiced by Balzac, Gogol, Hawthorne, Maupassant and Poe, among others. Pygmalionesque desires are also represented in novellas and novels, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (181718), which is contemporaneous with “Der Sandmann,” and fin-de-siècle texts including L’Eve future and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Furthermore, although some of these texts might encourage us to distinguish between the animation of organic and inorganic matter (bodies and body parts versus the painting in Wilde’s novel, for instance), I believe that their similarities—both are “dead” (literally or figuratively) when they are inanimate—outweigh their differences.2 Consequently, I will treat a reanimated corpse as analogous to a statue come to life because both challenge the distinctions between life and nonlife. The frequency of hybrid organic/inorganic forms, as in “Der Sandmann” and Frankenstein, supports this approach. The third issue I want to clarify is http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement: Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut

BLOOM, MICHELLE E.
Comparative Literature , Volume 52 (4) – Jan 1, 2000
Download PDF
30 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/pygmalionesque-delusions-and-illusions-of-movement-animation-from-00thh3q9BN

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2000 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-52-4-291
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

1 I use the neologism “gynomorphic,” which is the specifically female form of “anthropomorphic,” because in most nineteenth-century versions of the story the inanimate figure is female. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /292 This overview perhaps requires some explanation and qualification. First, by “literature” I mean primarily prose fiction. The short story was the most prevalent narrative form of the nineteenth-century fantastic, practiced by Balzac, Gogol, Hawthorne, Maupassant and Poe, among others. Pygmalionesque desires are also represented in novellas and novels, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (181718), which is contemporaneous with “Der Sandmann,” and fin-de-siècle texts including L’Eve future and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Furthermore, although some of these texts might encourage us to distinguish between the animation of organic and inorganic matter (bodies and body parts versus the painting in Wilde’s novel, for instance), I believe that their similarities—both are “dead” (literally or figuratively) when they are inanimate—outweigh their differences.2 Consequently, I will treat a reanimated corpse as analogous to a statue come to life because both challenge the distinctions between life and nonlife. The frequency of hybrid organic/inorganic forms, as in “Der Sandmann” and Frankenstein, supports this approach. The third issue I want to clarify is

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2000

There are no references for this article.