Abstract
"The Semblance of Things: Corporeal Gesture in Viennese Expressionism" examines the critical discourse surrounding the iconography of expressive gesture in fin-de-siècle Viennese visual culture, including their manifestation in early twentieth-century figural painting, modern cabaret and marionette theater productions, and alongside their theoretical explication in the emerging psychoanalytic discourse on clinical hysteria. Within this study, I consider how, and to what end, Viennese artists, actors, and playwrights experimented with the contorted, unnatural, and theatrical staging of corporeal form at the turn of the century, and the meaning these gestures were accorded in the visual and performing arts, as well as in psychological discourses examining the pathological body. My research demonstrates that a certain vogue for theatrical movements inspired by clinically-hysterical taxonomies, which I conceptualize as hysto-theatrical gestures, existed concomitantly among physicians, thespians, and playwrights in fin-de-siècle Central Europe, the latter of whom adapted these clinically-codified movements to the theatrical stage. Although modern psychological science would attempt to lay claim to these gestures and their meanings in the late nineteenth century, examples of these corporeal forms can nevertheless be identified in concurrent French Symbolist painting and modern German theater. Such hysto-theatrical gestures likewise provided the symbolic body language adopted by Viennese Expressionist painters in the early years of the twentieth century. This language was further imbricated by the widespread use of marionettes in avant-garde theater, the semiology of which was commonly understood as metaphors for human corporeality within the contemporary critical literature.
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