Format:
297 S.
Content:
The examination of the dynamic polarity of gender roles in Eyes Wide Shut focuses on how these roles are expressed through various modes of enunciation. These modes of enunciation include the following: personal, political, psychological, sexual, structural, and narrative. In relation to the first five of these enunciative modes, the film is considered as a series of events that constitute "statements" about gender, which have been set into a dialectical form. Each "statement" about gender roles made in the film’s first half is then given an antithetical response in the film’s second half. In the case of the final mode of enunciation, the narrative, a masculinized, verbal diegesis (denotative references to Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle) is set in place over a feminized, imagistic subtext (connotative allusions to Fleming/Vidor’s The Wizard of Oz); so that the interpenetration of the masculine with the feminine takes place moment by moment as the works narrative structure unfolds. Important themes which impact this study concerning the continuum of the feminine experience from youth to maturity are raised in the master narrative of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; while a masculinized theme of the quest of man to retrieve, or fail to retrieve, his feminine side, is examined in the "Story of Orpheus and Eurydice" from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The balancing of the dynamic polarity of gender roles is considered in light of Aristophanes’ Myth of the Androgyne from the Symposium of Plato.
Note:
Ohio, Univ., Comparative Arts (Fine Arts), Diss., 2004
Language:
German
Keywords:
Hochschulschrift
