The Representation of Masculinity in Crisis: An Interrogation of Its Roots and Reasons

This dissertation develops out of the disturbing realization that masculinity is pervasively represented as `in crisis.' It argues that both `masculinity' and `crisis' are discursive constructs, which have been functioning in unison since the late nineteenth century to bolster male hegemony. My introductory chapter offers an explication of how discursive domination functions at the level of signification. It explains, and applies to numerous examples, the method of discourse analysis developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and also engages with Reinhardt Koselleck's critical history of the concept `crisis,' which has recently been further developed in the work of Janet Roitman. In chapter two I examine the roots of the `masculinity in crisis' discourse in the European fin de siècle. This search proceeds by way of readings of Rémy de Gourmont's La Dissociation des Idées, Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, and Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter. Chapter two also examines the crucial role that the representation of women played in defining masculinity as `in crisis' during the period. My third and fourth chapters offer in-depth readings of several literary and cinematic works, these showing that while `masculinity' being represented as `in crisis' is a constant, the forms and tropes employed in this representation vary over time and are geographically contingent. I focus in chapter three on Arthur Schnitzler's stories Leutnant Gustl and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief, prose works within which contemporaneous psychological, gender and class discourses converge in protagonists representative of bourgeois Austrian masculinity `in crisis.' Chapter four argues by way of analyses of the canonical Weimar era films Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari and Die Straße as well as Ernst Toller's Heimkehrer drama Hinkemann that the sudden postwar domination of the discursive field by visual forms of media - what Martin Jay calls `a scopic regime' - resulted in `masculinity in crisis' becoming increasingly spectral - taking on ghostly and/or monstrous forms - and spectacular, namely as an event staged for the voyeuristic gaze. In my conclusion I pursue answers to why `masculinity' has been for over a century, and more importantly continues to be, pervasively represented as `in crisis.'Ph.D