2012 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Romantic fragment and the panorama as technologies of "subjectification"

Research Project

Project/Area Number	22520309
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	European literature (English literature excluded)
Research Institution	Kyoto University
Principal Investigator	KLAWITTER Arne 京都大学, 高等教育研究開発推進機構, 准教授 (90444778)
Project Period (FY)	2010 – 2012
Keywords	主観化 / フーコー / パノプティコン / パノラマ / 断片(断章)
Research Abstract	Until now the fragment has been studied either as a metaphor for aesthetic modernism or as a special form of the literary absolute. The planned investigation intends to overcome this conceptual framework and will ask for the conditions of the subject constitution. In particular, it asks how modern subjectivity expresses itself in artefacts and especially in literary forms like the fragment at the beginning of the 19th century and which role certain aesthetical forms could play for the constitution of the modern subject. The fragment, therefore, is understood as a medium that reflects the conditions of the subject constitution. In addition to the fragment, I want to examine the panorama as a second way of subjectification. Characteristic of the panorama is the view from an elevated point and the possibility of unlimited visibility. Thus, it implies the ubiquity of the gaze and is linked, in a certain sense, to the panopticon, which was described by Foucault in his study “Discipline and punish”. Both, fragmentation and to the arrangement of the panorama, will be studied as complementary techniques of subjectification.