Metachromatics: Applied color across media in the age of composite pictures (1839-1935)
Item
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Title
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Metachromatics: Applied color across media in the age of composite pictures (1839-1935)
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:696d15935f6f:11845
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identifier
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12466
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Creator
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Machado, Robert,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2013
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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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Literature | Multimedia communications | Film studies | Aesthetics | Color Theory | Early Cinema | Early Photography | Feminism | Narrative Theory
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Abstract
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This dissertation articulates an analytic for observing, measuring, contextualizing, recovering, and re-purposing chromatic fields within and across a variety of media and disciplines. Drawing on recent strategies within visual culture studies, including postclassical narratology, this framework adapts the historical division in aesthetics between color, and line and form, to examine color's differential status within verbal and visual expression and the social formations that its relations reflect, reinforce, or challenge. This enduring theoretical binarization---variously iterated and deployed at least since Antiquity---organizes an "inherent" opposition between color and line and form whose representation, by iconic analogy, has been used to assimilate and naturalize other binarically-construed ontologies, including identity formations, divisions of labor, and social hierarchies. In part because of its phenomenal instability, color within this discourse often functions as an especially receptive space into which constructions of non-figurability, alterity, abstraction, allusion, "essence," and desire are projected and inscribed. Opposite the indexical line and form of early photography and early cinema before the rise of "natural color" processes (1839--1935), and the "line and form" of narrative according to dominant theories of narratology, chromatic additions can be seen exemplifying this function. This dissertation tests the uses of this analytic within these media, and within considerations of intertexts and critical commentary that include intersections of realist and local color literature, Symbolist theater and painting, ekphrastic poetry, theories of art and sciences of vision, early photo-cinematic color labor, classical and postclassical narrative theory, and experimental methodologies of reading/reception.
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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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English
