In this work, I try to understand how the movements, attitudes, styles, and positions of the body in representational artworks can be understood as gestures—that is, as moments that interrupt the unfolding of narrative time and produce an interval. The interval is not merely a space that opens up between two moments and then closes again, but rather, a rupture that transforms the nature of the work’s temporal unfolding. I look closely at works by a handful of postwar French and Francophone authors in order to better understand in what ways reading them with this concept of gesture in mind allows us to untangle their political dimensions. Because gestures function as moments that suspend narrative time and turn our attention toward what is in the interval, they are able to draw power away from the precedence of action and its corresponding means–end logic. The gesture then offers us a privileged conceptual toolkit with which to understand the relationship between the formal innovations of these artists and what their works allow us to think.

Creator

• Winter, Maureen Theresa

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-n840-c987

Subject

• Comparative literature
• French literature
• Film studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_1007288
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16680

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright