@phdthesis{Mueller2017,
  author    = {M{\"u}ller, Eduard Rudolf},
  title     = {Architektur und Kunst im lyrischen Werk Johannes Bobrowskis},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-461-6},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-42711},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-427113},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {538},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Bobrowski had expressed the intention to study art history after graduation, but war and captivity thwarted his plans: As a member of the German Armed Forces, he was only released from military service for a semester in winter 1941/1942. Bobrowski was particularly impressed by the lectures on German Art in the Age of Goethe by the departmental chair Wilhelm Pinder. However, despite this fundamental influence Pinder's ideological background never become manifest in Bobrowski's poems. After returning from Soviet captivity during Christmas 1949, university studies were out of the question for the thirty-two-year-old. However, his lifelong intermedial engagement with fine art in his work can be interpreted as an expression of his diverse cultural and historical interests and inclinations. The poet's life phases correlate with the thematic development of his poems on visual art: The inviolable aesthetics of significant works of art helped him to overcome the horror of the last years of the war and the privations of Soviet captivity. Didactic moral aims initially shaped the poems Bobrowski created in the years after his return home before he was able to distance himself in terms of content and form from this type of poetry and began to write poems that take up cultural-historical aspects and juxtapose historical, mythological, biblical and religious-philosophical themes spanning epochs. His poems about the artists Jawlensky and Calder also touch simultaneously on aspects of the cultural landscape. In the last decade of his life, Bobrowski became increasingly interested in twentieth-century art, while modern architecture was absent from his work. Bobrowski devoted himself in an entire series of poems to Classicist and Romanticist painting and thus to works that were written during the Age of Goethe and about which Wilhelm Pinder may have given lectures during his "German Art in the Age of Goethe" course attended by Bobrowski. Architecture is a leitmotif in Bobrowski's lyrical works. The significance conveyed of the particular sacred and profane buildings referred to in the poems as well as the urban and village ensembles and individual parts of buildings changes several times over the years. Starting from traditional, juxtaposed juvenile poems in iambic versification, in which architectural elements form part of an awareness that fades out everything outside of the aesthetic, the significance of the sacred and secular buildings in Bobrowski's lyrical works changes for the first time during the years he spent in Russia during the war as part of the German military. In the odes Bobrowski wrote at the time, the architectural relics testify to suffering, death and destruction. What is still absent, however, is the central idea of guilt, which later becomes the focus of poems he writes after his return from captivity until his early death. Towards the end of the war and during his years of captivity, Bobrowski reflects on the theme of his homeland again, and the architecture in his poems becomes an aesthetically charged projection for his yearning for East Prussia and the Memel area. The aspect of the sublime first appears in his poems, both in relation to painting and architecture, during his captivity. This idea is developed on the one hand after his return to Berlin in his poems on the architecture of Gothic cathedrals and the architectural heritage of Classicism, but the cultural heritage of Europe also represents historical injustice and a heavy, far-reaching guilt in the poems written during this period. Bobrowski turns away from his criticism of the entire continent of Europe in later years and in his "Sarmatic Divan" concentrates on the guilt Germans have towards the peoples of Eastern Europe. This also lends the architecture in his poems a new meaning. The relics of the castles of the Teutonic Order testify to the rule of medieval conquerors and merge with nature: The symbolism of the architecture becomes part of the landscape. In the last decade of his life, he increasingly writes poems related to parks and urban green spaces. The city, "filled with meaning", moves to the centre of his poetry. However he does not deal with the technical achievements and social phenomena of urban life in these poems but with urban structures and especially the green and open spaces as symbols of history. The poet relies not only on personal experiences, but sometimes also on image sources without ever having seen the original. The poems about Chagall and Gauguin are hardly accessible without the knowledge that they refer to image reproductions in narrow, popular books that Bobrowski acquired shortly before writing the respective poems. The situation is different with the Russian churches that find their way into his lyrical works. Bobrowski had seen them all during the war, and most of them still appear to exist today and can be identified with some certainty with the help in part of the poet's letters from that period.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{Reimer2015,
  author    = {Reimer, Anna Maria},
  title     = {The poetics of the real and aesthetics of the reel},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-95660},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {298},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {The dissertation proposes that the spread of photography and popular cinema in 19th- and 20th-century-India have shaped an aesthetic and affective code integral to the reading and interpretation of Indian English novels, particularly when they address photography and/or cinema film, as in the case of the four corpus texts. In analyzing the nexus between 'real' and 'reel', the dissertation shows how the texts address the reader as media consumer and virtual image projector. Furthermore, the study discusses the Indian English novel against the backdrop of the cultural and medial transformations of the 20th century to elaborate how these influenced the novel's aesthetics. Drawing upon reception aesthetics, the author devises the concept of the 'implied spectator' to analyze the aesthetic impact of the novels' images as visual textures. No God in Sight (2005) by Altaf Tyrewala comprises of a string of 41 interior monologues, loosely connected through their narrators' random encounters in Mumbai in the year 2000. Although marked by continuous perspective shifts, the text creates a sensation of acute immediacy. Here, the reader is addressed as implied spectator and is sutured into the narrated world like a film spectator ― an effect created through the use of continuity editing as a narrative technique. Similarly, Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2002) coll(oc)ates disparate narrative perspectives and explores photography as an artistic practice, historiographic recorder and epistemological tool. The narrative appears guided by the random viewing of old photographs by the protagonist and primary narrator, the photographer Paresh Bhatt. However, it is the photographic negative and the practice of superimposition that render this string of episodes and different perspectives narratively consequential and cosmologically meaningful. Photography thus marks the perfect symbiosis of autobiography and historiography. Tabish Khair's Filming. A Love Story (2007) immerses readers in the cine-aesthetic of 1930s and 40s Bombay film, the era in which the embedded plot is set. Plotline, central scenes and characters evoke the key films of Indian cinema history such as Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" or Raj Kapoor's "Awara". Ultimately, the text written as film dissolves the boundary between fiction and (narrated) reality, reel and real, thereby showing that the images of individual memory are inextricably intertwined with and shaped by collective memory. Ultimately, the reconstruction of the past as and through film(s) conquers trauma and endows the Partition of India as a historic experience of brutal contingency with meaning. The Bioscope Man (Indrajit Hazra, 2008) is a picaresque narrative set in Calcutta - India's cultural capital and birthplace of Indian cinema at the beginning of the 20th century. The autodiegetic narrator Abani Chatterjee relates his rise and fall as silent film star, alternating between the modes of tell and show. He is both autodiegetic narrator and spectator or perceiving consciousness, seeing himself in his manifold screen roles. Beyond his film roles however, the narrator remains a void. The marked psychoanalytical symbolism of the text is accentuated by repeated invocations of dark caves and the laterna magica. Here too, 'reel life' mirrors and foreshadows real life as Indian and Bengali history again interlace with private history. Abani Chatterjee thus emerges as a quintessentially modern man of no qualities who assumes definitive shape only in the lost reels of the films he starred in. The final chapter argues that the static images and visual frames forwarded in the texts observe an integral psychological function: Premised upon linear perspective they imply a singular, static subjectivity appealing to the postmodern subject. In the corpus texts, the rise of digital technology in the 1990s thus appears not so much to have displaced older image repertories, practices and media techniques, than it has lent them greater visibility and appeal. Moreover, bricolage and pastiche emerge as cultural techniques which marked modernity from its inception. What the novels thus perpetuate is a media archeology not entirely servant to the poetics of the real. The permeable subject and the notion of the gaze as an active exchange as encapsulated in the concept of darshan - ideas informing all four texts - bespeak the resilience of a mythical universe continually re-instantiated in new technologies and uses. Eventually, the novels convey a sense of subalternity to a substantially Hindu nationalist history and historiography, the centrifugal force of which developed in the twentieth century and continues into the present.},
  language  = {en}
}