Seeing and Hearing through Glass: An Exegesis of the Artificial in Der Sandmann

Feng Shu Lee*

*此作品的通信作者

研究成果: Article同行評審

摘要

Glass prevailed in nineteenth-century European culture as both material and metaphor. Its transparency, its ability to create optical illusions, and the sound of glass musical instruments suggested a presence that appealed to the senses even as it misguided them. In this article, I argue that glass helps to define an object that both resembles and yet contradicts humanity in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and J. Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann. Hoffmann and Offenbach referenced glass’s visual and sonic attributes to depict the artificiality of the automaton Olympia. They also drew on associations between glass and illusion to enforce the negative meaning of its artificiality. This reading reflects nineteenth-century authors’ and artists’ responses to visual perception’s susceptibility to external manipulation. It also reveals cultural anxieties over the definition of humanity.

原文English
頁(從 - 到)119-137
頁數19
期刊Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture
16
發行號1
DOIs
出版狀態Published - 2022

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