An Esthetics of Injury2013

Examining literary and filmic representations of the open wound, this dissertation reveals injury to be an essential esthetic principle in the work of seven exemplary authors and two filmmakers from the French and German-language canons: Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Hélène Cixous, Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as Werner Schroeter and Michael Haneke. As a kind of corporeal inscription, the wound must be read, I argue, as a model for the variety of esthetic experience each artwork aspires to provoke--indeed, to inflict. Art for art, in these authors' and filmmakers' oeuvres, becomes an injury for the sake of injury, and this dissertation traces the inheritance of Baudelairean decadence and estheticism into and throughout the twentieth century.