The aim of this study is to use an intermedial theory to analyse and contextualize embodiment and violence in the Chinese author Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. I use Jørgen Bruhn’s mediality model, introduced in The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter (2016), to analyse medial phenomena such as intra- and intermediality in the novel. Bruhn’s model mainly covers relations between several media and within a single medium. The focus of this study lies on the blending of different media within the novel. My hypothesis is that the depiction of embodied violence in the novel is a literary strategy, based on cognitive functions and Chinese oral traditions to communicate historical events, as well as through an intermedial depiction of those events, a way to avoid censorship. Of particular importance to this study are medial phenomena connected to visualization of memories, and intermediality as discipline a voice between media texts, to establish how a literary text through narrative techniques can create an illusion of cinematic blending. I see this as an illustration of the historical hierarchical struggle between art forms. This is a broader perspective on literary depiction in Mo Yan’s novel than generally can be found in interpretations originating in a Western discourse. The result of my study shows that medial phenomena such as inter- and intramediality are woven into a narrative theme of remembrance of historical political events. Such memories are communicated through depictions of embodied violence, as well as the impact of trauma on anonymous bodies reminiscent of cinematic techniques, heightened by the metafictive voice of Mo Yan within the novel. It is a perspective that is also accentuated through auditory and visual elements that recall the ability of audio-visual media techniques to create identification with exposed bodies through close-up depictions of body and violence. Hence, Mo Yan has constructed a grid of medial phenomena in the novel through which he is able to convey historical processes without risking censorship.

This thesis investigates the aesthetic interpretation of learning processes in television produced and broadcast in Sweden between 1956 and 1969. The thesis explores how these programmes are linked to concepts of Bildung by their aesthetics, by which the intangible cultural heritage is entrusted in the form of oral and visual traditions, storytelling and games/play, where learning is the common denominator. The programmes are divided into three categories: aesthetics of attentiveness, aesthetics of tale/storytelling and aesthetics of play. The detailed, thick, descriptions of the programmes emanating from the close-readings shall be, together with the aesthetic categories that I have formulated and expressed in a model, regarded as the survey’s key findings. The starting point of the central theoretical model of the thesis is André Malraux’s idea of an imaginary museum of imagination in which photo reproductions can constitute a collective memory, and thus bepart of an intangible heritage. Based on this idea of ​​an imaginary museum, I have constructed a conceptual model called a medial museum, valid in its own time as well as for posterity. The theoretical models that the study gain support from are characterized by phenomenological and hermeneutical perspectives, as I refer to  a phenomenological-hermeneutical method when analysing the programmes, and at the same time underline the phenomenological-hermeneutically based aesthetics in the analysed programmes, where aesthetic interpretation of learning processes in terms of attentiveness, tale and play is of a phenomenological-hermeneutic character. For a broad perspective on learning processes, theoretical support is acquired both from the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his hermeneutic of traditions and from the French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his emancipatory ideas of pedagogy and aesthetics. Furthermore, the French philosopher Paul Ricœur and his thoughts on importance of storytelling for knowledge formation have had significant influence on the work. Regarding the concepts of play, I have made use of both Gadamer’s ideas of ​​art experience as play and of Donald W. Winnicott’s theories about play as transitional area. In the programmes’ aesthetics is found a depiction of a broadened interpretation of Bildung, where processes of learning comprise a direct sensual perceiving, attentiveness, storytelling/tale and play. Moreover, within the programmes’ managing of an intangible cultural heritage, I have found an expression of an interplay between modernity and tradition, with emphasis on the historical significance of the present, and rooting in the past of everyday life, where expectation on the future and the memory of the past can co-exist. To summarise, the study suggests the possibility to understand aesthetics as an epistemology using sensuous experience as basis for a conceptual knowledge about how to understand the world. Thereby, one can comprehend aesthetics as pedagogy per se.