Dream work : the art and science of fin de siècle fantasy imagery (original) (raw)

2006

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that the fantasy imagery of tum-of-the-century British illustrators Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sidney Sime, and French filmmakers Georges Melies and Emile Cohl functions as visual rhetorical "texts" that explicate contemporaneous ideas about the self. At the fin de siecle, models of the self were shaped, in part, by scientific thought that interrogated themes of materiality and immateriality, visibility and invisibility, univalence and multivalence, permanence and impermanence. Dream Work grapples with these oppositions, the questions they brought up, and the provisional answers they elicited. I argue that both the science and the design considered in this study dealt with these oppositions, and the models of the self they elaborated, through a shared visual rhetoric of literal representation or hazy abstraction. I reveal this shared visual rhetoric through analysis of the form of the design considered in this study and its relation...

Leslie Atzmon hasn't uploaded this paper.

Let Leslie know you want this paper to be uploaded.

Ask for this paper to be uploaded.