UC Berkeley

This study makes a contribution to the question of what it means to engage with literary and filmic texts in times of a transnational, environmental crisis. To this end, it takes up texts as complex, poetic encounters with diverse ecologies. Specifically, this study investigates the ecological complexity of the figure of the shadow as it emerges in filmic and literary texts. A prominent figure in the catalogue of uncanny doubles, the shadow is most commonly interpreted as a representation of interiority--the soul. This project offers a different perspective: the shadow as a figure that explores the limits of the body and its profound enmeshments with the material, nonhuman world. Rather than focusing on the shadow as a figure of immateriality, lack, or absence, I pursue it as an interface between the human body and its environment. In works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, F. W. Murnau, Walter Benjamin, and Thomas Mann, the shadow is overfull and lively. It contests the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman and challenges notions of human isolation and apartness from her environment.

This project benefits from the recent material and ecocritical turns in literary theories. Ecocriticisms and new feminist materialisms that build the theoretical scaffolding of this project repudiate the notion that matter is passive and explore the complexity of the interactions between humans and nonhumans. Furthermore, I rely on queer ecologies as well, which challenge binaries like human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, man/woman, nature/culture. Explored against this backdrop, the shadow emerges as a figure with the potential to reconfigure the sensible and to disclose the present life-worlds as always in flux. It situates human bodies in their environment and broadcasts their profound enmeshment with the material, nonhuman world. This study foregrounds the shadow's potential to upset, or rather queer, the essentialized elements and limits of human and nonhuman bodies.

In this project, I also investigate how advances in technologies of seeing (x-ray, cinema, and psychoanalysis), and the shadow's involvement in these technologies register in literary, philosophical, or filmic works. I furthermore ask how the shadow, reconfigured through said technologies at the close of the nineteenth century, brings about the disruption of the distinction between inside/outside, reframes the situatedness of the human, and functions as an interface between the human and the nonhuman in selected texts.