This dissertation argues that Russia’s confrontation with modernity generated a series of sociocultural paradigm crises that gave rise to a modernist grotesque aesthetic tradition, uniting over forty years of artistic production into a coherent literary movement. While close reading the work of Fyodor Sologub (The Petty Demon [Мелкий бес]), Andrei Bely (Petersburg [Петербург]), Evgenii Zamyatin (At World’s End [На куличках]), and Velimir Khlebnikov (“The Crane” [Журавль]), I argue that prerevolutionary modernist writers utilized grotesque modes of representation to depict a world where the former cornerstones of pre-modern Russian identity are fracturing under the pressures of modernity. In contrast to extant scholarship, I argue the 1917 Revolution is not a fundamental break in Russia’s experience of the crisis of modernity, but an extension, and an exacerbation of it. Though discourses of Russian identity formation will be rapidly recodified around the Soviet project, the same underlying grotesque aesthetic devices used by pre-revolutionary authors are taken up by a new generation of Soviet-era modernists. Mikhail Zoshchenko’s parody in Michel Sinyagin (Мишель Синягин) elicits skepticism about yesterday’s unenlightened masses becoming today’s new Tolstoys. Andrei Platonov’s anomalous depictions of the Russian periphery in his Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море) are still inhabited by monsters, too far from Soviet nodes of power to be assimilated into the national ideological project. And Konstantin Vaginov (in the novel Goat Song [Козлиная песнь]) and Evgenii Shvarts (in the play The Shadow [Тень]) capture the prevalence of superfluous intellectuals with ruptured psyches, frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new Soviet reality.

In this essay Murakami Haruki’s novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle was analysed from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope. The aim was to explore the concept of time and space as presented in the novel. In particular, the analysis focused on how Bakhtin’s chronotopes can be applied to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, how the chronotopes can enhance our understanding of the novel, and finally how the chronotope theory can be applied to the concept of ‘magic realism’ that is often used to describe Murakami’s authorship. Four chronotopes, presented by Bachtin, were selected and applied to the novel: every-day life, the road, crisis and the castle. The concept of the chronotope allows analysis of how time and space work together in literature and how they form patterns of correlation in the sujet. Results showed that the four chronotopes were found in the novel, and that they also interacted with each other. The chronotope of everyday-life was apparent throughout the novel, and the narrator was under its control. The narrator also seemed to create every-day life out of the chronotopes of the road and crisis by re-living the crises in the road. These three chronotopes seemed inseparable in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Finally, the fourth chronotope, the castle, illustrated how a concrete room in the novel, a house, became a part of time and space through a character who, by his presence, gave the impression of slowing down time. When this character disappeared, time made its way through space, making the chronotope of the castle visible. The essay concludes that the chronotope theory was a relevant way to analyse The Wind Up Chronicle as it provided a concept of how time and space appeared together in a novel where time and space is always present. The analysis helped creating a way of understanding the patterns in the novel, which were not always clear, thereby also increasing the understanding of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

This dissertation deploys theories of spatiotemporal experience and organization, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” to set contemporary literature, film, and music into dialogue with theories of post-Wende social and political experiences and possibility that speak, with Francis Fukuyama, as the contemporary as the “End of History.” Where these interlocutors of Fukuyama generally affirm or intensify his view of the contemporary as a time where historical progress slows to a halt, historical memory recedes from view, and the conditions of subjecthood are rephrased from participation in a struggle for progress to mindless consumption and technocratic tinkering, I engage contemporary artwork to flesh out and ultimately peer beyond the boundaries of the real and the possible these social theories articulate. Through a series of close readings of German films, music albums, and novels published between 1995 and 2021, I examine how German authors, filmmakers, and musicians pursue depictions of the malaises of the End of History while also resolutely pointing to the fissures in liberal capitalist hegemony where history—its past and its future—again becomes visible. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, a text’s unified expression of space and time, is central to my method of analysis. In tracing the chronotopic contours of contemporary works of music, film, and literature, I argue, we—as readers, viewers, and listeners—are engaged to think and act alongside the forms and figures that populate the worlds their authors create. In doing so, we ultimately uncover forceful accusations, resolute alternatives, and even hopeful antidotes to the deficiencies of our present that help us both to soberly contemplate the implications the pessimistic formulations of contemporary theory have on our lives, communities, and futures but also to formulate possibilities for them that lie beyond their analytical purview.In a series of close readings of my literary, filmic, and musical primary texts, I engage theorists of the post-Cold War, post-Wende contemporary who write about the political order and social conditions emerging out of the triumph of neoliberalism and market capitalism over socialist, communist, and fascist alternatives. The dissertation begins by establishing a wide view of the contemporary, tracing in its first chapter chronotopic resonances of Hartmut Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis—which locates the aimlessness and alienation of contemporary society within the accelerationist logic of market capitalist modes of production—across the full temporal arc of the contemporary. Pairing Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995) with Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen (2017), I argue that the futilities and frustrations of the modern subject, as foretold in Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay and fleshed out in Rosa’s writings on social acceleration, find resonance not only in the wealthy, educated, white protagonist of Faserland’s 1990s, but also in the impoverished, undereducated, Turkish-Kurdish protagonist of Ellbogen some twenty years later. What connects these two accounts across decades and differences in identities, I demonstrate, is not merely a shared sense of alienation and despair, but a shared, underlying chronotopic characterization of the contemporary. These commonalities appear, I demonstrate, when we connect Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis to diegetic chronotopes of perpetual motion that depict modern subjects’ inability to avail themselves of the ostensibly liberatory potential of liberal capitalism’s accelerated lifeworld. Chapter 2 then considers Byung-Chul Han’s theory of auto-exploitation and the dilemma of the music novel at a time where the rebellion of punk against social integration has been thoroughly incorporated into capitalism. Reading Marc Degens’ Fuckin Sushi (2015), I examine the novel’s concept of “Abrentnern” as a model for personal and communal fulfillment for those who turn to art as a means self-determination in the age of auto-exploitation. Unlike Kracht and Aydemir, however, Degens sees the closing off of historical possibilities for the good life enjoyed by his punk forbears—here, self-determination through transgressive artistic praxis—not as the contemporary subject’s damnation to cyclical patterns of despair but as a challenge to conceive of the good life anew. Working humorously through its hapless protagonist Niels’ repeated attempts to escape the seemingly inevitable for-profit co-option of his sincere artistic efforts, the novel serves to unveil the persistence of blind spots in this regime of totalizing exploitation. What results is an account of the double-edged logic of capitalist productivity’s ostensible totalization of labor-time. Capitalism, Niels unwittingly discovers, is a logic of production so overwhelming that it continuously drives subjects towards the discovery of new alterities that, for a brief time at least, allow subjects once again to slip between the cracks. The third chapter explores a similar phenomenon of halting resistance to the conditions of the capitalist present through the lens of futurity. Here, I push back against Mark Fisher’s theory of the dominance of “Capitalist Realism” in the contemporary aesthetic imagination, identifying and developing the notion of “subtle futurity”—the modest, yet resolute rephrasing of future possibility beyond the “way things are” of the present—in Leif Randt’s Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty (2011) In this light, I argue, Randt’s gestures towards a different future, however halting, mark a significant effort to imagine a benevolent form of future possibility within the context of an era often suspected to have been exhausted of its utopian sentiment. The final two chapters turn to past-minded works that more forcefully repudiate notions of the present as static or closed off from the movement of history. Chapter Four considers W.G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, Die Ringe des Saturn, and The Caretaker’s 2012 album, Patience (After Sebald), developing an account of the chronotopic means by which these works revisit materials of the past within the present. Chronotopic motifs of paraphrase—techniques of sampling in The Caretaker and narrative polyphony in Sebald—come together within macro-level chronotopic frameworks of peripatetic movement—looping repetition in The Caretaker and the retracing of bygone journeys in Sebald—to testify to the unanswered questions and unfinished work of history over and against notions of the present as a time where the past has been relegated to mere museum content or nostalgia for bygone ways of living. Where Chapter Four speaks primarily to the formal mechanisms by which the present rediscovers the past, Chapter Five examines two specific chronotopic innovations for thematically engaging constellations of past-present inter-temporality. Both Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel, Adas Raum, and Christian Petzold’s 2018 film, Transit, develop chronotopes wherein past and present are intermingled in increasingly inseparable ways. Adas Raum, I demonstrate, is organized spatiotemporally as a nexus of coiled loops—pasts and presents intertwine, heaven and earth are tangled together, and the fates of human beings and even non-human objects follow spatial and temporal trajectories that weave in and out of conventional linear understandings of space and time. In similar fashion, past and present become inseparable in Petzold’s film, an adaptation of the Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, through thematic and formal approaches of blurring that blend the plight of refugees of Seghers’ era with those of Petzold’s present day. History, then, appears remarkably robust in these texts, unfolding accounts of how human beings living through their present might take guidance from the generations that preceded them in the struggle for a better world.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:23:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 3419.pdf: 1908813 bytes, checksum: 00e2359e53f73b176da4dec0219ba4aa (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-09-10 / The film Pink Floyd The Wall, adaptation to the cinema of the Pink Floyd´s concept album, tells the Pink´s story, a musician, that was born in England during the World War II final years, he had his father died in a battle and this fact start a process of depression and melancholy that culminate in his total apathy towards life. This research has its focus on the literary content of the songs from the original album, the aim is study the film formal structure, its differences, similarities and complementarities comparing to the album narrative, observing the translation and artistic recreation process from the album to the movie and also confirming the dialogical relations between the different problems, contextualization, languages and representations explored in this art piece. / O filme Pink Floyd The Wall, adaptação para o cinema do álbum conceitual da banda Pink Floyd, narra a história, desde a infância até sua completa alienação, do protagonista Pink, um músico nascido na Inglaterra nos anos finais da Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuja morte do pai durante a guerra lhe desencadeia um processo de depressão e melancolia que culmina em sua total apatia diante da vida. A presente pesquisa, tendo como foco o teor literário das canções do álbum original, tem por objetivo o estudo da estrutura formal do tecido fílmico, suas diferenças, semelhanças e complementaridades com a narrativa musical contida no álbum, observando e constatando os processos de tradução e recriação de uma obra para outra, além das relações dialógicas entre as diferentes problemáticas, contextualizações, linguagens e representações exploradas na obra.

「沙皇亞歷山大一世之研究」主要以歷史分析法(History Analysis Method)為主軸，針對俄國沙皇亞歷山大一世（Tsar Alexander Ⅰ）從出生(24 Dec 1777)一直到逝世(26 Dec 1825)的一生事蹟，包括了少年成長時期、執政時期(1801-1825年)的社會情況、內政外交、軍事行為等加以研究分析，以提出對此段歷史的分析解釋以及對其後歷史的影響。 由於凱薩琳大帝精心設計的教育歷程，使得亞歷山大一世成為俄國皇室中有史以來第一位具有啟蒙思想的沙皇並且懷有著改革俄國的夢想。然而亞歷山大一世經常在言行上出現不一致的狀況。舉例來說，少年時代的他曾不只一次地表明本身並不適於擔任沙皇，然而日後他卻在一場弒父的流血政變中登基﹔他宣稱自己熱愛憲政，但卻未能實踐他對憲政主義的理想；他一再地表示對農奴制度極端地憎惡，但卻沒有對這項制度有較為激烈的改革﹔他在外交上表示別無所求只願歐洲和平的想法，卻一再地與法國以及瑞典、顎圖曼土耳其帝國等發生戰爭。因此，為了解釋這種矛盾性，大部分的史家經常將亞歷山大一世描寫為一個謎題一般神秘而且矛盾的人物，或者將他描繪成詭計多端、不真誠的乃至於白癡與精神分裂，以提出對於亞歷山大一世如此矛盾不協調的統治的解釋。除了以這種方式來解釋亞歷山大一世的統治歷程外，本篇文章旨在更進一步地深入瞭解沙皇的性格與人格特質，以及將外在條件的制約納入分析思考的範圍中，以對此段歷史提出更為全面而廣泛地解釋。 終亞歷山大一生，他耗費了相當多的時間在國內改革與外交事務的參與上。1801年即位之始，他便汲汲營營地進行各項改革，然而由於國內改革事務存在的艱困阻礙加上拿破崙的壓力，逐漸促使他遠離內政改革而將心思轉向外交事務上。在提爾斯特條約暫時地解脫亞歷山大一世在外交與軍事上的壓力之後，亞歷山大一世又回到內政改革上，他任命了麥克海爾•史普蘭斯基為國務卿，並且命他進行憲政計劃的草擬。由於許多的原因，史普蘭斯基所提出的計劃沒能夠全盤被執行，而憲政改革又再次陷入了停擺。1812年，俄國面臨了拿破崙侵略的威脅，最終又捲入與法國的戰爭中。在拿破崙經歷了征俄戰爭以及最終受到聯軍的圍剿而徹底失敗之後，亞歷山大一世成為歐洲最有勢力的統治者，他的功績在此時達到最高峰，並且要將歐洲改造成新的局面，最終藉由神聖同盟的設立而完成他的志願。在回到國內之後，亞歷山大一世似乎已經準備好再次面對內政的改革。然而沙皇對於革命的畏懼更勝於他對改革的熱情，1820年代俄國國內的不安以及國外的革命騷亂終究使得他的改革劃下了句點。雖然亞歷山大一世未能完成他的改革理想，但無可置疑地，他仍是19世紀裡俄國與歐洲歷史上的重要角色。 本文第一章緒論針對研究動機與目的、研究途徑與架構、文獻分析與研究限制與問題提出說明。第二章係對亞歷山大一世之成長背景，主要探討十八世紀末俄國現況，凱薩琳二世及保羅一世對亞歷山大一世成長的影響。第三章則對亞歷山大一世的內政改革，包括農奴政策、憲政改革、以及其他經濟文教的改革加以研究論述。第四章論述亞歷山大一世的外交與軍事作為，包括俄法戰爭、維也納會議、歐洲協調、四國同盟與神聖同盟等問題。第五章針對亞歷山大一世晚期的作為提出綜合檢討與回顧。第六章為結論。 / The Study of Tsar Alexander I mainly explores the history of the whole life of the Russian Tsar Alexander I (1801-1825). This article basically use the historical analysis method to describe and analysis the history from Alexander I's birth (24 Dec 1777) until his death (26 Dec 1825), which covers his childhood, youth, and his behaviors after his ascended to the throne. And finally provides the explanation and analysis of the history about this period of time, and it’s influence for later history. Due to Catherine II’s delicated education, Alexander I was the first tsar who had the enlightened thoughts and had dreams to reform Russia. But his behaviors were usually contradictory to his words. More than once he professed he was unsuitable for the exercise of power, yet he ascended to the throne in a bloody coup which involved the murder of Paul I; He claimed to love constitutions, yet he failed to realize his ideal to implement the constitutional reform; He frequently expressed his abhorrence of serfdom, yet he did little to challenge this institution; He asserted that his only ambition is to promote the peace of the Europe, yet he fought not only with France, but also with Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Historians usually explained the incongruities of his highly paradoxical reign by portraying Alexander as everything from scheming and insincere to idiotic to schizophrenic. In addition to this kind of explanation for his reign, This article aims at exploring the tsar’s personality and character more deeply and taking the outside constraints on his reign into consideration in order to analysis and explain the history of his lifetime more broadly. Through his lifetime, Alexander I spent most of his time in domestic reforms and diplomatic affairs. After his coronation, he eagerly engaged in domestic reform. However, the difficulties he faced in domestic reforms and the oppressions from Napoleon gradually pushed him to turn away to diplomatic affairs. Until the temporary relief of Tilsit treaty, he proceeded to domestic reforms again. He appointed Mikhail Speransky as the state secretary, and ordered him to draft the plan of constitution. Due to a lot of reasons Speransky’s plan was canceled and the constitution reform was delayed again. In 1812, Russia faced the aggression oeagerly engaged in domestic reform. However, the difficulties he faced in domestic reforms and the oppressions from Napoleon gradually pushed him to turn away to diplomatic affairs. Until the temporary relief of Tilsit treaty, he proceeded to domestic reforms again. He appointed Mikhail Speransky as the state secretary, and ordered him to draft the plan of constitution. Due to a lot of reasons Speransky’s plan was canceled and eagerly engaged in domestic reform. However, the difficulties he faced in domestic reforms and the oppressions from Napoleon gradually pusArakachev to start oppressive and cruel rule until his death. Despite of his failure to fufill all the reforms, generally speaking, he still is a dominant figure in both Russian and European history in the nineteenth century. The construction of this article is as follows：The first chapter focuses on the tropics about motives and intentions of this study, study methods and construction, the article analysis and the study limits. The second chapter explores the background of Alexander I’s growth, which about the tropics of current situations of the end of 18 century, and the influence of Catherine II and Paul I on the growth of Alexander I. The third chapter explores the tropics about the domestic reforms which include the serfs question, the constitutional reform, and other reforms about economy and education. The fourth chapter explores the diplomatic and military behaviors of Alexander I, which includes the tropics of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Vienna conference, the European settlement, the Quadruple Alliance and the Holly Alliance. The fifth chapter explores the last years of AlexanderⅠ’s rule, and provide the full analysis and overview. The sixth chapter is conclusion.