Bodies of Glass: A Cultural and Literary History of Transparent Humans

This dissertation presents a cultural historical analysis of the transparent human as a figure in European literature and culture from early modernity to the 20th century. Exploring the ways in which humans are represented as transparent throughout European cultural history, I investigate the distinct notions of the human disclosed by each historical constellation. Spanning literary, medical, visual, and political sources, my research assembles the composite cultural plot that yields such phenomena as the melancholic glass humans of early modernity, the trope of the transparent heart in Enlightenment literature, the Faustian restaging of the alchemic fantasy of an artificial human replica, the visual rhetoric of glass anatomic models displayed in German hygiene exhibitions during the 1930s. In my dissertation I argue that the appearance of the figure of a transparent human on the stage of cultural history always signals and performs a crucial negotiation between competing notions of the human. The stakes of this negotiation are the boundaries between the individual and the community, the categories of normality and pathology, of power and impotence, of purity and contamination. The way a transparent human represents and arbitrates these conflicts is different in each case. The transformative, metamorphic imagination of a body that abolishes flesh for a transparent material such as glass plays out as a fantasy of transcending the human, sometimes overcoming its mortality, sometimes enhancing its fragility. The dissertation is articulated in four chronologically organized chapters: 1. Breakable Bodies: Early Modern Humans of Glass in Cervantes's "El Licenciado Vidriera"; 2. A Transparent Heart: Mechanics and Poetics in Laurence Sterne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; 3. A Human in a Glass Bottle: Goethe’s Homunculus and Romantic Embodiment; 4. 20th-Century Transparent Bodies: From Social Hygiene to Nazi Propaganda. The historical placement of each figure within the cultural coordinates and discourses that have contributed to its emergence yields an account of this figure along the unfolding of a narration that, without being teleological, tells the story of how humans have fantasized, imagined, constructed, and reinvented their bodies