Florian Zitzelsberger | Universität Passau (original) (raw)
Papers by Florian Zitzelsberger
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2024
In this article, I use the image of parallels meeting, impossible contact, to address the contest... more In this article, I use the image of parallels meeting, impossible contact, to address the contested relationship between queerness and narrative within the framework of queer narrative theory--as seemingly incompatible domains. In a first step, I offer permutations of the terms that compose queer / narrative / theory to show that perspectives from the fields of queer theory and narrative theory can mutually enrich each other as well as our understanding of queer form if they are perceived as sides of the same conceptual coin. In a second step, I put these perspectives to use in a consideration of queer coincidences in The Last Five Years (2014). Looking at the genre-conventional marriage plot of the film musical, I read the narrative structure of The Last Five Years, which tells its story twice, once chronologically and once in reverse, as indicative of a queer temporality. I argue that the queerness of this constellation does not necessarily lie in the disordering of time but rather in the unlikely, if not impossible, contact between distinct (life)worlds it enables, which I consider an effect of narrative metalepsis. Taken together, these perspectives support the idea that queer form in / of narrative emerges from the tensions that make queer narrative theory appear contradictory.
Amerikastudien/American Studies
This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic-staging Will... more This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic-staging William Finn and James Lapine's musical Falsettos and Tony Kushner's Angels in America-to consider alternative forms of relationality in a time when the collective experience of performance has been impeded by the closure of theaters and safety measures such as social distancing. Presentingmaking present-the AIDS crisis, the cross-temporal dialogues facilitated by these productions reconfigure viewers' affective relations and responses to both past and present pandemics. Attuning viewers to queer rhythms, the temporal disorientation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic can become a source of solidarity. Two case studies exemplify what an aesthetics of social distance might look like: By suggesting relations across time as well as the screen, actors, characters, and viewers are brought together despite their temporal and physical distance. Such metaleptic encounters compensate for the lost contact during a performance with a feeling of presence and presentness.
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture
What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in ... more What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in drag performance towards the un/gendered non/post/in/human, we reconsider what, precisely, makes a performance drag. Integrating insights from queer theory, performance studies and critical posthumanism, this editorial develops a framework to not only provide an orientation to the individual contributions of this Special Issue, but also argue for a larger theoretical turn in drag scholarship. We consider the composite materiality of and relationship between the human performer and their posthuman drag, and propose that the act of dragging, which can use, but does not exclusively rely on gender, constitutes a more expansive queer performance modality that makes the familiar strange, yet allows for recognition in what is otherwise unintelligible. Posthuman drag celebrates the abject, the marginal and the un/imaginable, shifts the focus from disaster to potentiality and imagines a future in...
This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to design... more This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to designate the transgression of the border between distinct narrative levels, from the perspective of a postclassical, queer narratology. Emanating from the transmedial adaptation and application of the phenomenon, the article first suggests a complementary definition of metalepsis as displacement, before theorising metalepsis as a queer signifying practice. Looking at the relationship between metalepsis, mimesis and heteronormativity, the article proposes that metaleptic occurrences constitute an exceedance of the compulsory form of narrative, which is based on linearity and heteroreference, and thus questions, clashes with, if not undermines, normative conceptualizations of narrative.
Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 2020
After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrati... more After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrative levels, and the term ‘unnatural’ in various strands of narratology, this article argues that unnatural narratology, a postclassical approach specifically dedicated to non- or antimimetic narrative phenomena like metalepsis, follows what Eve Sedgwick calls paranoid inquiry. The perspective of queer narratology subsequently weighs in on discussions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘unnaturalness’ in a reparative effort: Metalepsis, as theorized in this paper, is expressive of the queer failure at being ‘natural’ and thus possesses a potential to articulate desires that are usually made invisible, inconceivable, or unintelligible by the normative framework and exclusionary rhetoric of narratology. Case studies of the video game What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) and the film musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) complement my theoretical deliberations and show that metalepsis can be more than...
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2022
This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic—staging Will... more This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic—staging William Finn and James Lapine’s musical Falsettos and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—to consider alternative forms of relationality in a time when the collective experience of performance has been impeded by the closure of theaters and safety measures such as social distancing. Presenting— making present—the AIDS crisis, the cross-temporal dialogues facilitated by these productions reconfigure viewers’ affective relations and responses to both past and present pandemics. Attuning viewers to queer rhythms, the temporal disorientation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic can become a source of solidarity. Two case studies exemplify what an aesthetics of social distance might look like: By suggesting relations across time as well as the screen, actors, characters, and viewers are brought together despite their temporal and physical distance. Such metaleptic encounters compensate for the lost contact during a performance with a feeling of presence and presentness.
JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, 2022
This article looks at the ending of the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2016-2019) to argue that it ope... more This article looks at the ending of the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2016-2019) to argue that it opens up the narrative to multiple readings, rather than offering a conventional conclusion, synthesis, or closure. As a television musical, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend adapts the conventions of stage and film musicals, which the article connects to two storytelling techniques that play with seemingly distinct (narrative) worlds. First, metalepsis offers the possibility of affective alignment in creating a shared space of introspection between the show’s protagonist and other characters as well as viewers. Second, positioned in the framework of narrative complexity, the ending gives incentive to a retrospective reading that opens up alternative ways of sense-making. The underlying argument is that the processes of introspection and retrospection can become vehicles for audience address and that the ending can become an alternate beginning for viewers’ understanding.
F&E Edition 27, 2022
Looking at recent examples of hashtag activism as collaborative storytelling practices and digita... more Looking at recent examples of hashtag activism as collaborative storytelling practices and digital political communication, this article argues that sharing – in the sense of collectively held beliefs and grievances and their potential for creating narrative and social movements on social media – can be seen as operating on an educational level as well. Drawing on Ruth Page’s concept of the shared story and an analysis of the #MeToo movement, the article positions hashtag activism as a case study for sharing ideas, experiences, and skills, and the acquisition of information and media literacy. By extension, the paper provides an example of adopting an interdisciplinary approach in higher education that aims at enabling future teachers to retell, adapt, and remix stories and skills for their work in the EFL classroom.
RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul's Drag Race, 2022
Makeup in the World of Beauty Vlogging: Community, Commerce, and Culture, 2020
Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 2020
This article examines three Captain America fanfictions that imagine the eponymous hero’s cinemat... more This article examines three Captain America fanfictions that imagine the eponymous hero’s cinematic representation as queer in an effort to gauge the impact of a queer Captain America on U.S. society and culture. At the same time, these texts scrutinise the public perception of heroes as agents of heteronormativity, as heterosexual subjects, and objects of a heterosexual gaze, through the incorporation of (social) media responses in their fictional microcosms. Moving beyond the reductive equation of heroic masculinity and heterosexuality, the analysed texts open up more inclusive discourses of desire, disclosure, and dissent by following the coming-out stories of their heroes. The virtual spaces of fandom are put into conversation with the closet, which renders private, and possibly queer, identities invisible, and coming out as an act of publicly (re)gaining agency and self-determinacy. The article offers a queer reading of one of Marvel’s most beloved characters by reassessing the Captain America films and laying bare the constructedness of hetero-heroism that structures and motivates the films’ narratives. American queeroes in fanfiction are thus not just fantasies – they constitute reactions to and efforts against the oppressive framework of heteronormativity which obscures and limits the potential queerness of characters in mass media representations.
COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 2020
After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrati... more After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrative levels, and the term ‘unnatural’ in various strands of narratology, this article argues that unnatural narratology, a postclassical approach specifically dedicated to non- or antimimetic narrative phenomena like metalepsis, follows what Eve Sedgwick calls paranoid inquiry. The perspective of queer narratology subsequently weighs in on discussions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘unnaturalness’ in a reparative effort: Metalepsis, as theorized in this paper, is expressive of the queer failure at being ‘natural’ and thus possesses a potential to articulate desires that are usually made invisible, inconceivable, or unintelligible by the normative framework and exclusionary rhetoric of narratology. Case studies of the video game What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) and the film musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) complement my theoretical deliberations and show that metalepsis can be more than ‘unnatural’ by affirming desires grounded in positive affects related to togetherness, belonging, and unity.
Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2019
This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to design... more This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to designate the transgression of the border between distinct narrative levels, from the perspective of a postclassical, queer narratology. Emanating from the transmedial adaptation and application of the phenomenon, the article first suggests a complementary definition of metalepsis as displacement, before theorising metalepsis as a queer signifying practice. Looking at the relationship between metalepsis, mimesis and heteronormativity, the article proposes that metaleptic occurrences constitute an exceedance of the compulsory form of narrative, which is based on linearity and heteroreference, and thus questions, clashes with, if not undermines, normative conceptualizations of narrative.
Humanities, 2019
This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’... more This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism.
Queering Visual Cultures: Re-Presenting Sexual Politics on Stage and Screen, 2018
Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction, 2018
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2018
This article argues that the remediation of theatrical elements in film, i.e. the ample employmen... more This article argues that the remediation of theatrical elements in film, i.e. the ample employment of non-systemic signs through the cinematic filter, facilitates a critical engagement with the medial properties of film. While theatrical production has expanded into the realm of film in recent years through mediatization and live broadcasting, a similar, yet inverse, development can be observed in film: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) are just two out of many examples showing cinema’s tendency of emulating live performance. The films’ illusions of liveness cannot be upheld, however, and are broken by the employment of cinematic signs. As such, theatrical films foreground their constructedness and negotiate the impossibility of recreating liveness on screen; they draw attention to their status as spectacles and in a society increasingly dependent on mediatization within a capitalist context. Taking into account the semiosis of theater and film, respectively, the article thus establishes that semiotic transitions, as described above, manifest themselves in genre transgressions: In ways reminiscent of Brechtian theater, The Hateful Eight and Birdman forge critical awareness towards their screened representations; theatricality, therefore, accentuates the perceived naturalization of generic conventions in film (in this case a western and an action/superhero film), and marks them as constructs precisely because the use of theatrical elements does not play into audience’s expectations. By extension, the article analyzes the political dimension of these films and asks whether spectacles, famously theorized by Guy Debord as inherently tautological and uncritical products of mediatized mass cultures, are able to comment on the system they emerge from and whether they can effectively revision the conventions of generic film.
Book Reviews by Florian Zitzelsberger
JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 2020
Review of: Feyersinger, Erwin. Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological... more Review of: Feyersinger, Erwin. Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels (Film and Television Studies 1). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter (2017).
Conference Presentations by Florian Zitzelsberger
Posthuman Bodies and Embodied Posthumanisms, 2022
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2024
In this article, I use the image of parallels meeting, impossible contact, to address the contest... more In this article, I use the image of parallels meeting, impossible contact, to address the contested relationship between queerness and narrative within the framework of queer narrative theory--as seemingly incompatible domains. In a first step, I offer permutations of the terms that compose queer / narrative / theory to show that perspectives from the fields of queer theory and narrative theory can mutually enrich each other as well as our understanding of queer form if they are perceived as sides of the same conceptual coin. In a second step, I put these perspectives to use in a consideration of queer coincidences in The Last Five Years (2014). Looking at the genre-conventional marriage plot of the film musical, I read the narrative structure of The Last Five Years, which tells its story twice, once chronologically and once in reverse, as indicative of a queer temporality. I argue that the queerness of this constellation does not necessarily lie in the disordering of time but rather in the unlikely, if not impossible, contact between distinct (life)worlds it enables, which I consider an effect of narrative metalepsis. Taken together, these perspectives support the idea that queer form in / of narrative emerges from the tensions that make queer narrative theory appear contradictory.
Amerikastudien/American Studies
This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic-staging Will... more This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic-staging William Finn and James Lapine's musical Falsettos and Tony Kushner's Angels in America-to consider alternative forms of relationality in a time when the collective experience of performance has been impeded by the closure of theaters and safety measures such as social distancing. Presentingmaking present-the AIDS crisis, the cross-temporal dialogues facilitated by these productions reconfigure viewers' affective relations and responses to both past and present pandemics. Attuning viewers to queer rhythms, the temporal disorientation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic can become a source of solidarity. Two case studies exemplify what an aesthetics of social distance might look like: By suggesting relations across time as well as the screen, actors, characters, and viewers are brought together despite their temporal and physical distance. Such metaleptic encounters compensate for the lost contact during a performance with a feeling of presence and presentness.
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture
What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in ... more What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in drag performance towards the un/gendered non/post/in/human, we reconsider what, precisely, makes a performance drag. Integrating insights from queer theory, performance studies and critical posthumanism, this editorial develops a framework to not only provide an orientation to the individual contributions of this Special Issue, but also argue for a larger theoretical turn in drag scholarship. We consider the composite materiality of and relationship between the human performer and their posthuman drag, and propose that the act of dragging, which can use, but does not exclusively rely on gender, constitutes a more expansive queer performance modality that makes the familiar strange, yet allows for recognition in what is otherwise unintelligible. Posthuman drag celebrates the abject, the marginal and the un/imaginable, shifts the focus from disaster to potentiality and imagines a future in...
This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to design... more This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to designate the transgression of the border between distinct narrative levels, from the perspective of a postclassical, queer narratology. Emanating from the transmedial adaptation and application of the phenomenon, the article first suggests a complementary definition of metalepsis as displacement, before theorising metalepsis as a queer signifying practice. Looking at the relationship between metalepsis, mimesis and heteronormativity, the article proposes that metaleptic occurrences constitute an exceedance of the compulsory form of narrative, which is based on linearity and heteroreference, and thus questions, clashes with, if not undermines, normative conceptualizations of narrative.
Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 2020
After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrati... more After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrative levels, and the term ‘unnatural’ in various strands of narratology, this article argues that unnatural narratology, a postclassical approach specifically dedicated to non- or antimimetic narrative phenomena like metalepsis, follows what Eve Sedgwick calls paranoid inquiry. The perspective of queer narratology subsequently weighs in on discussions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘unnaturalness’ in a reparative effort: Metalepsis, as theorized in this paper, is expressive of the queer failure at being ‘natural’ and thus possesses a potential to articulate desires that are usually made invisible, inconceivable, or unintelligible by the normative framework and exclusionary rhetoric of narratology. Case studies of the video game What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) and the film musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) complement my theoretical deliberations and show that metalepsis can be more than...
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2022
This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic—staging Will... more This article turns to digital productions of AIDS drama during the COVID-19 pandemic—staging William Finn and James Lapine’s musical Falsettos and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—to consider alternative forms of relationality in a time when the collective experience of performance has been impeded by the closure of theaters and safety measures such as social distancing. Presenting— making present—the AIDS crisis, the cross-temporal dialogues facilitated by these productions reconfigure viewers’ affective relations and responses to both past and present pandemics. Attuning viewers to queer rhythms, the temporal disorientation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic can become a source of solidarity. Two case studies exemplify what an aesthetics of social distance might look like: By suggesting relations across time as well as the screen, actors, characters, and viewers are brought together despite their temporal and physical distance. Such metaleptic encounters compensate for the lost contact during a performance with a feeling of presence and presentness.
JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, 2022
This article looks at the ending of the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2016-2019) to argue that it ope... more This article looks at the ending of the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2016-2019) to argue that it opens up the narrative to multiple readings, rather than offering a conventional conclusion, synthesis, or closure. As a television musical, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend adapts the conventions of stage and film musicals, which the article connects to two storytelling techniques that play with seemingly distinct (narrative) worlds. First, metalepsis offers the possibility of affective alignment in creating a shared space of introspection between the show’s protagonist and other characters as well as viewers. Second, positioned in the framework of narrative complexity, the ending gives incentive to a retrospective reading that opens up alternative ways of sense-making. The underlying argument is that the processes of introspection and retrospection can become vehicles for audience address and that the ending can become an alternate beginning for viewers’ understanding.
F&E Edition 27, 2022
Looking at recent examples of hashtag activism as collaborative storytelling practices and digita... more Looking at recent examples of hashtag activism as collaborative storytelling practices and digital political communication, this article argues that sharing – in the sense of collectively held beliefs and grievances and their potential for creating narrative and social movements on social media – can be seen as operating on an educational level as well. Drawing on Ruth Page’s concept of the shared story and an analysis of the #MeToo movement, the article positions hashtag activism as a case study for sharing ideas, experiences, and skills, and the acquisition of information and media literacy. By extension, the paper provides an example of adopting an interdisciplinary approach in higher education that aims at enabling future teachers to retell, adapt, and remix stories and skills for their work in the EFL classroom.
RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul's Drag Race, 2022
Makeup in the World of Beauty Vlogging: Community, Commerce, and Culture, 2020
Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 2020
This article examines three Captain America fanfictions that imagine the eponymous hero’s cinemat... more This article examines three Captain America fanfictions that imagine the eponymous hero’s cinematic representation as queer in an effort to gauge the impact of a queer Captain America on U.S. society and culture. At the same time, these texts scrutinise the public perception of heroes as agents of heteronormativity, as heterosexual subjects, and objects of a heterosexual gaze, through the incorporation of (social) media responses in their fictional microcosms. Moving beyond the reductive equation of heroic masculinity and heterosexuality, the analysed texts open up more inclusive discourses of desire, disclosure, and dissent by following the coming-out stories of their heroes. The virtual spaces of fandom are put into conversation with the closet, which renders private, and possibly queer, identities invisible, and coming out as an act of publicly (re)gaining agency and self-determinacy. The article offers a queer reading of one of Marvel’s most beloved characters by reassessing the Captain America films and laying bare the constructedness of hetero-heroism that structures and motivates the films’ narratives. American queeroes in fanfiction are thus not just fantasies – they constitute reactions to and efforts against the oppressive framework of heteronormativity which obscures and limits the potential queerness of characters in mass media representations.
COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 2020
After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrati... more After tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrative levels, and the term ‘unnatural’ in various strands of narratology, this article argues that unnatural narratology, a postclassical approach specifically dedicated to non- or antimimetic narrative phenomena like metalepsis, follows what Eve Sedgwick calls paranoid inquiry. The perspective of queer narratology subsequently weighs in on discussions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘unnaturalness’ in a reparative effort: Metalepsis, as theorized in this paper, is expressive of the queer failure at being ‘natural’ and thus possesses a potential to articulate desires that are usually made invisible, inconceivable, or unintelligible by the normative framework and exclusionary rhetoric of narratology. Case studies of the video game What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) and the film musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) complement my theoretical deliberations and show that metalepsis can be more than ‘unnatural’ by affirming desires grounded in positive affects related to togetherness, belonging, and unity.
Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2019
This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to design... more This article critically reviews the concept of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette to designate the transgression of the border between distinct narrative levels, from the perspective of a postclassical, queer narratology. Emanating from the transmedial adaptation and application of the phenomenon, the article first suggests a complementary definition of metalepsis as displacement, before theorising metalepsis as a queer signifying practice. Looking at the relationship between metalepsis, mimesis and heteronormativity, the article proposes that metaleptic occurrences constitute an exceedance of the compulsory form of narrative, which is based on linearity and heteroreference, and thus questions, clashes with, if not undermines, normative conceptualizations of narrative.
Humanities, 2019
This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’... more This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism.
Queering Visual Cultures: Re-Presenting Sexual Politics on Stage and Screen, 2018
Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction, 2018
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2018
This article argues that the remediation of theatrical elements in film, i.e. the ample employmen... more This article argues that the remediation of theatrical elements in film, i.e. the ample employment of non-systemic signs through the cinematic filter, facilitates a critical engagement with the medial properties of film. While theatrical production has expanded into the realm of film in recent years through mediatization and live broadcasting, a similar, yet inverse, development can be observed in film: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) are just two out of many examples showing cinema’s tendency of emulating live performance. The films’ illusions of liveness cannot be upheld, however, and are broken by the employment of cinematic signs. As such, theatrical films foreground their constructedness and negotiate the impossibility of recreating liveness on screen; they draw attention to their status as spectacles and in a society increasingly dependent on mediatization within a capitalist context. Taking into account the semiosis of theater and film, respectively, the article thus establishes that semiotic transitions, as described above, manifest themselves in genre transgressions: In ways reminiscent of Brechtian theater, The Hateful Eight and Birdman forge critical awareness towards their screened representations; theatricality, therefore, accentuates the perceived naturalization of generic conventions in film (in this case a western and an action/superhero film), and marks them as constructs precisely because the use of theatrical elements does not play into audience’s expectations. By extension, the article analyzes the political dimension of these films and asks whether spectacles, famously theorized by Guy Debord as inherently tautological and uncritical products of mediatized mass cultures, are able to comment on the system they emerge from and whether they can effectively revision the conventions of generic film.
JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 2020
Review of: Feyersinger, Erwin. Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological... more Review of: Feyersinger, Erwin. Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels (Film and Television Studies 1). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter (2017).
Posthuman Bodies and Embodied Posthumanisms, 2022
Northeast Modern Language Association, 53rd Annual Convention, 2022
Northeast Modern Language Association, 53rd Annual Convention, 2022
Queer Temporalities in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games International Conference, 2021
Queer Temporalities in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games International Conference, 2021
Epidemics and Othering: The Biopolitics of COVID-19 in Historical and Cultural Perspectives, 2021
Theorizing Zombiism II: Undead Again, 2021
Participation in American Culture and Society, 2021
67th Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies
Northeast Modern Language Association, 52nd Annual Convention, 2021
Northeast Modern Language Association, 52nd Annual Convention, 2021
Gothic Nature III: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic, 2020
Supermodels of the World: RuPaul's Drag Race as International Phenomenon, 2020
Mirror, Mirror: Perceptions, Deceptions, and Reflections in Time International Conference, 2020
Challenges of the Post-Truth Era in American Studies (Postgraduate Forum der DGfA), 2019
Music Across Media: Functions, Convergence, Meaning International Conference, 2017
50 Shades of Popular Culture 2nd International Conference, 2017
Spectacular Now: The Politics of the Contemporary Spectacle, 2016
ERA American Studies Student Conference, 2016