Die Welt als Bild

Zur Domestizierung der Fremde durch den Kitsch im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel von Weltausstellung und Interieur

KulturPoetik
2007/7,2
p. 166–178

2007
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About this book

The following article examines the dominance of image-based perception in the 19th century as a key element in European self-understanding. This perception domesticates the external world, the non-European rest of the world, as can be seen in the concept of the ‘bourgeois intérieur’ interpreted by Walter Benjamin in his remarks on World Expositions, by Charlotte Brontë, who visited theWorld Exposition of 1851 in London, and by Marcel Proust. The latter describes the interior as a kind of projection surface where the subject can withdraw to recompose an external world that is more and more manifold. The strange and the unfamiliar are comprehended by a concept of picturesque projection that can be put in relation to the camera obscura as a medium of modern interiority.