"Dead Man"'s space and the language of democracy on the American frontier
Item
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Title
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"Dead Man"'s space and the language of democracy on the American frontier
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1bf5b6cd95ee:11300
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identifier
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11729
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Creator
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Colleran, Daniel Ellington,
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Contributor
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John Brenkman
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Comparative literature | Film studies | Philosophy | Democracy | Henri Michaux | Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man | U.S. Frontier | Western | William Blake
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Abstract
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Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995) borrows its artistic vision from the works of Francophone poet, writer, and painter Henri Michaux (1899-1984) and English Romantic poet, painter, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827). It does so through a series of verbal and visual incorporations. Both poets emphasize the ability of language to either stabilize or destabilize our perception of the world. Blake understands art as something that enhances human vision beyond linguistic conventions and social institutions. Michaux's work positions language as something that can resist and confront the reified familiarities of everyday existence, jar congealed conventions of society, or negotiate the abyssal absurdity of life.;Both poets consistently employ two sets of tropes; one composed of figures of fluidity, transgression, and expansion and the other composed of figures of containment and delimitation. These tropes, which are employed to illustrate a tension that arises from our inability to fully envision the world through language, resonate forcefully in the film and against the history of the Western as a genre that is bound up with space and its ideological representations. They generate reflection on the space of the American West and explore how such a space is linguistically produced, contained, and expanded. Through a close reading of word and image, my dissertation renders the effect of Blake and Michaux's figurative language on the cinematic space of Dead Man . This reading focuses on the tension between the compulsion to transgress boundaries and the desire to contain and delimit an immutable worldview.;The overriding argument of the dissertation is that the film's movement from the figurative language of fixity, containing, and sheltering, to the figurative language of openness, fluidity, transgression, and incommensurability, and finally, the cyclic movement back to the beginning of the film's narrative, reflects the formation of the social landscape of an American past and present that is bound up with the tension of these disparate figures. Dead Man illustrates the impulse to bound and preserve very singular and institutionalized readings of an idealized past and the almost insatiable desire for endless expansion. The film journeys through these defining characteristics of American experience, which form irresolvable tensions that lie at the heart of any national narrative, whether negotiated openly and consciously or as hidden traces that haunt the productions of its discursive socio-political fabric.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
