The following thesis examines the poetic oeuvre of George Grosz in relation to selected drawings from the same period of time. A survey of the research on George Grosz shows that the scholarly focus has so far mainly been on his work as a visual artist, whereas his published poems have not been treated with as much attention. Furthermore, there exists no in-depth analysis of possible intermedial relations between his poetic and visual works, although titles of poems and drawings, editorial characteristics of the publication of poems and drawings respectively, and the themes of both suggest a relation between the medially different artefacts of Grosz?s work. <br ><br /> The goal of this thesis is to analyse and interpret intermedial relations between Grosz?s poems and drawings and thus affirm their existence as a constituent element of his work. Following Jan Mukarovský?s suggestion of the dual character of content/theme and structure in every artefact, the thesis is subdivided into two separate analyses of content and structure of poems and drawings and their respective intermedial relations. The methodology used to analyse Grosz? work as an intermedial phenomenon draws from the theoretical background of both semiotics and intermediality. Of eminent importance for the methodology are thus Umberto Eco?s works on semiotics and Roland Barthes? works on semiotics in general and on the semantics of visual language in particular. Fernande Saint-Martin?s <em>Semiotics of Visual Language</em> (1990) serves as reference work for the analyses of the structural characteristics of Grosz? drawings and Roman Jakobson?s and Jirý Veltruský?s works on semiotics shed light on the structural differences between verbal and visual language. Furthermore, Irina O. Rajewsky?s systematic introduction to the field of intermedial research, <em>Intermedialität</em> (2002), provides an apparatus with which to categorize structural relations between poems and paintings. <br ><br /> The content analysis of poems and drawings focuses on certain recurrent topoi. These are the topoi of the big city, America and (circus) artists. The analyses show intermedial relations and are valuable for the (re-)interpretation of certain topoi, especially when it comes to the evaluation of the Americatopos. The most prominent and dominant topos in both media proves to be the big city. Overall, the analysis of thematic relations mirrors semiotic theory: poems as verbal artefacts are able to provide more content-information than the visual language of the drawings. <br ><br /> The structural analysis focuses on certain modes of visual representation as employed by the drawings, and sets out to show intermedial reverberations of the visual structures in the poems and how the verbal structures succeed in evoking certain structural characteristics of visual language in general of and Grosz?s drawings in particular. Whereas there is a semantic advantage of verbal language in the intermedial relations of the contents of the artefacts, the structural analyses show that it is visual structures that govern the relations between poems and drawings. Again, this can be put down to semiotic characteristics: visual language is less strucurally regulated than its verbal counterpart. <br ><br /> The conclusion tries to merge the results of the separate analyses by stating that intermedial relations exist and encompass the dualism of content and structure that makes up the artefacts. The specific character of the intermedial relations mirrors the characteristics of the two semiotic systems employed by drawings and poems, i. e. visual and verbal language. Finally, it is suggested that thematic and structural relations are mainly governed by the topos of the big city, which hence can be seen as the thematic and structural paradigm of the analysed poems and drawings by George Grosz and of their intermedial relations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:WATERLOO/oai:uwspace.uwaterloo.ca:10012/761 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Holzheimer, Sandro |
| Publisher | University of Waterloo |
| Source Sets | University of Waterloo Electronic Theses Repository |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf, 1727228 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright: 2005, Holzheimer, Sandro. All rights reserved. |
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