Learning to See in Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20655728 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Patrizia C Mcbride (Cornell University, corresponding author), Patrizia Mcbride |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 84 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 220-238 |
| Publication date | 2011-04-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The German Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8831 • E-ISSN: 1756-1183 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1756-1183.2011.00112.x |
| OpenAlex | W2061939552 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
This essay examines Irmgard Keun's novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) against the backdrop of Weimar‐era discourses on the emancipatory potential of vision. While the narrative's thematization of vision has been productively analyzed from the perspective of feminist and film theory, less attention has been paid to its ties to contemporary discourses concerned with retooling a vision enhanced by new technologies like film into an instrument of emancipatory self‐fashioning. As the article shows, Keun's novel reflects critically on these discourses by casting its heroine's sentimental journey in terms of an education in vision that leads to acknowledging the distance between the visual as a mode of inscription and the visible as a domain of perception. In so doing the novel delivers a critical commentary on contemporary discourses that located agency in a conquest of the visible attained by manipulating the visual
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Art · Literature · Narrative · Perspective (graphical) · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Literature and Cultural Memory
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |