Germanic and Slavic Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Female Masochism in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-27) Yaworski, Kristin; Kuzniar, Alice
The figure of the female masochist, along with her desires and experiences, has been largely ignored within theories of masochism and examinations of masochistic aesthetics. With the rise of more graphic and challenging representations of female sexuality in cinema, it is time to readdress the female masochist and her representation in film. This thesis aims to fill this gap by examining representations of heterosexual female masochism in Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001) and Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac (2013). Both films centre around a female protagonist whose masochistic desires and impulses propel the narrative forward. While these masochistic desires lead to ugly and violent sexual encounters with the main male character in each film, masochism is not condemned as the reason for this violence. It is, instead, normatizing world views that violently restrict notions of female subjectivity and sexuality. In this thesis, I examine the empowering aspects of masochism presented in these films. The female masochist exercises control over her desires and fantasies by creating and establishing a masochistic contract with her partner. In analyzing the contract in both films, it becomes clear that it allows for the female protagonist to be empowered. That the contract is betrayed and the female masochist is subjected to violence is indicative of how she continues to be restricted by gendered expectations of female behaviour. Such a conclusion is further supported through both films’ use of an anti-aesthetic. In contrast to the normative aesthetics of S/M, which emphasize pleasure over pain, the aesthetic in La Pianiste and Nymphomaniac insists on showing the infliction of pain and its effects on the female masochist. It is through this depiction of pain that both films invite spectators to reconsider the dangerous comfort of views that allow for such violence to persist.
Gewalt und Spiele in den Filmen Michael Hanekes
(University of Waterloo, 2020-01-16) Hirstein, Mario; Kuzniar, Alice; Fetscher, Justus
This dissertation examines the intersection of violence and games in six of Michael Haneke’s movies, Benny’s Video (1992), Happy End (2017), Le Temps du loup (2003), Funny Games (1997/2007), 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994), and Caché (2006). Relying on Imbusch’s concept of direct and indirect violence, Galtung’s model of “structural” violence as well as canonical theories of games, such as Huizinga’s notion of a “magic circle,” a fictional space that is devoid of any real-world consequences, I argue that Michael Haneke’s films exemplify the ludic qualities that the most common forms of violence have today. The emergence of violence, which often rests on a blatant disruption of Huizinga’s “magic circle,” takes various forms across Haneke’s films. In Benny’s Video, the young protagonist learns through games to virtualize his surroundings and immunizes himself to suffering and ethical consequences. The pyramid scheme informing his actions lays bare the foundation of the film’s violence, namely the economic world order. Happy End continues and actualizes these themes in a new medial landscape: now everything seems to happen online, yet the victims of the games that the affluent protagonists play suffer in real life. Le Temps du loup highlights another violent aspect of games, their ritualistic nature. Girard’s theories on rituals and sacrifice are vital to understanding this postapocalyptic film that at first seems to subscribe to the deescalating effect of rituals but then satirizes them through its montage and incorporation of a real animal death. Funny Games explores the involvement of the audience in mind-gaming further. Not only do the two intruders Peter and Paul play violent games with the captured family, but Haneke does so with the viewers as well: the film commits violence against the audience in order to “teach” viewers to not see fictional violence as a form of entertainment. 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls invokes the concept of a playing god and ultimately shows the replacement of a religious worldview by an economic one. A young student, Max, is tormented by his peers who always involve him in games that require bets; the games are not played for their enjoyment but for financial gain. Finally, in Caché, we find motives from all hitherto analyzed movies of Haneke: guilt and childhood, the virtualizing effects of games and videos, ritual sacrifice, ironic employment of a “dark pedagogy” (Rutschky), and, most importantly, the ubiquity of ludic structures in the neoliberal present, which has harsh effects on underprivileged players. While games and violence are intertwined in many ways, it is especially this last point, the meta-game of economics, which conjoins both concepts. The structural violence that is inscribed in the global financial game time and again becomes visible in Haneke’s oeuvre – and Haneke’s involvement of the audience in meta-diegetic “mind games” (Elsaesser) is crucial for understanding cultural and economic violence as a constant in our daily lives.
Kylie Jenner and Her Instagram Audience: A Lacanian Cultural Analysis
(University of Waterloo, 2019-08-27) Pekarskaya, Viktoria; Kuzniar, Alice; Wortmann, Thomas
This thesis aims to examine the perception of female gender on Instagram by utilizing a conceptual framework based on the Mirror Stage theory of Jacques Lacan. Taking Kylie Jenner’s Instagram profile as an example of virtually-constructed female gender representation, I will describe the Instagram mode of operation and its cultural and social implications for users’ identity formation processes. I will analyze four positively and three negatively assessed Instagram posts by Kylie Jenner. Guided by Lacanian terms and concepts, I will investigate the behavioral and emotional patterns of Kylie Jenner and her followers on Instagram, providing insights into the specificities of gender, race, and class performance in the context of new media. By means of a qualitative analysis of the comments section, I have divided Kylie Jenner’s Instagram posts into two categories. The first entails images of Kylie presenting herself in a traditional female role as a mother, sister, daughter, or beauty-oriented woman. The second comprises all image deviations from that traditional feminine representation, including Kylie as an entrepreneur, billionaire, and car lover. In the subsequent analysis, I will compare followers’ reactions to both categories by studying 500 randomly chosen comments for all seven selected posts. I will calculate the number and proportion of positive, negative, conversational, neutral, international, and Like Back comments in order to place the posts on a gradual scale and trace correlations between the position of the post on the scale, its femininity level, and its function as an object of self-identification. I will argue that followers tend to show more approval when Kylie presents herself in a traditional female role. The posts in which Kylie occupies gender-unmarked or masculine interests are expected to initiate concern, negative emotions, and fierce debate in the comments section. The posts that conform to the “feminine” domain, on the contrary, are usually better assessed and less discussed. Moreover, I will aim to prove that Kylie Jenner’s negatively assessed content tends to dilute race and gender dichotomies.
Master Thesis Narrative Search for the Golden Spikes. Analyzing the Anthropocene in Theory and Fiction.
(University of Waterloo, 2016-08-31) Schmidt, Lisa Marie; Fetscher, Justus; Kuzniar, Alice
The term Anthropocene, according to an increasing number of scientists, describes the recent stadium of Earth History, having opened with the industrialization. Terminologically and conceptually, it refers to the triggering of telluric processes such as anthropogenic climate warming, which solely derive from human activity, and should replace the current state of the Holocene. Exceeding his originative fields of geology and environmental sciences, the term currently presents itself as a concept with a growing potential for boom. Demonstrating a growing lexematic relevance and a conceptual fertile ground for descriptive models of tilting or turning points, describing the current state of humanity as upheaval, the Anthropocene contains a potential for diagnosing and overcoming disciplinary boundaries between sciences and humanities, exceeding not just the dimension of climate change but also other traditional political, social and fictional dimension of dystopian forecasts. Its fruitfulness has triggered extensive analyses of the conceptual implications of the anthropocentric idea by renowned institutional and staffing sizes of histories of arts and culture, philosophy and literary studies, sociology, economic and legal sciences. When it comes to its ratification, the latter disciplines are even ahead of its original subjects, and its phenomenology has recently been fortifying remarkably diversified interpretations and interpretations of the Human Factor. Against this background, the thesis examines both the theoretical and fictional realms of the Anthropocene as human self-description. In doing so, it delivers two parts of an explanation why both hard sciences and humanities depend on fictional elements whenever making an attempt of self-description: The Anthropocene mixes historical regrets, guilt, as well as projections, discussions, transfigurations and models for the future. Therefore, the literary analysis furthermore presents an outline of the poetic, narrative, typological and aesthetic means of its imaginative con- and destruction, illustration, interpretation and analysis. Therefore, the discussion of the Anthropocene is put against the background of culturephilosophical and historical traditions such as those of Adorno (1944; 1941; 1958 i.a.), Foucault (1969, 1976, 2004) and Benjamin (1969, 1974, i.a.). Special attention is paid to the concept of the Posthuman (Braidotti 2013), Horn’s (2014) idea of future as catastrophe, the geopolitics of literature (Werber 2014) and the approach of the post-souvereign narrative (Schaffrick et al 2015). In doing so, the thesis identifies locality as the main category of human “roots” and the concept of agency.
Towards a Posthumanist Eco-Zoopoetics: Kafkas‘ Tiergeschichten and Yoko Tawadas Etüden im Schnee
(University of Waterloo, 2019-09-09) Stephan, Sigmund Jakob Michael; Kuzniar, Alice; Weiß, Christoph
The burgeoning trans-disciplinary field of (post-humanist) eco-zoopoetics is concerned with the question of how the human can represent animals and nature without ignoring their otherness. My thesis argues that literature can help readers to register this alterity by subverting the alleged readability of non-human beings. By doing this, literature sheds doubt on the human as being at the core of an anthropocentric epistemology to whom the world appears to be readable. To prove this, I will employ Uexküll’s Umweltlehre as a paradigm of reading animals and nature to discuss animal protagonists in Kafka’s Tiergeschichten, i.e. Der Bau, Forschungen eines Hundes, and Bericht für eine Akademie, and Tawada’s contemporary novel Etüden im Schnee which evokes Kafka’s animal stories. By showing that these literary texts render their creatures and their nature(s) unreadable in terms of Umweltlehre, I will introduce the Umweltlehre as a key in showing how literature can hint at non-human otherness. Reading Der Bau and Forschungen eines Hunden, the recipients as much as Kafka’s creatures fail to decipher the opaque environments to which the texts expose them even though the creatures and their readers long for it. I have chosen to call their shared futile desire of reading Umweltsehnsucht. The creatures of Der Bericht für eine Akademie and Etüden im Schnee confront the readers with a circus environment which blurs the border between a human and an animal environment. Drawing on the aesthetics of the circus and Foucault’s conception of Heterotopia, I will argue that Kafka and Tawada situate their creatures in the Hetero-Umwelt of the circus which renders its participants unreadable for the observer in terms of homogeneous environments. As a result, the circus creatures can neither be read as humans nor as animals. Instead, the readers can read them as they desire. They can acknowledge or ignore the non-human otherness of the circus creature. The circus appears to be an ambiguous place which can evoke and subvert the infantile desire of its audience to identify itself with the non-human creatures at the same time.

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Browsing Germanic and Slavic Studies by Author "Kuzniar, Alice"