| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
The subject matter in this thesis is focused on Marc Chagall’s 96 illustrations for Dead Souls, an epic novel by Nikolai Gogol, produced between 1923-27; and to explore all of these illustrations Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “grotesque realism” asserted in his carnival aesthetics is largely adopted.
Among the numerous artworks of Chagall the French painter, this series of illustration is usually glimpsed as one of the trilogy made in his French years, neither has it been regarded as the representative work of the artist noted for his abundant uses of color and imagination. Nevertheless through the parallelism between text and illustration suggested in this thesis, the researcher is going to discover that these etchings not only re-demonstrate the creative style of the painter himself, but indicate the concealed dimensions of the novel from specific point of interpretation. In each seemingly rough and grotesque caricature, Russian literary theorist M. Bakhtin’s viewpoint of dialogical principle and carnivalism is proved to explain the artist’s ways of interpretation appropriately.
In the process of examining iconographs with literary theory, the researcher has chosen the same attitude with the artist himself so as to consider the position of text and illustration as equally independent; the novel and the etchings are taken as two individual texts and thus the dialogues between texts begins. Therefore this thesis is developed as three-chaptered discussion: first, the respective backgrounds of the novel and the illustration; second, the pictorial style of the artist himself in order to point out the specific pictorial techniques in Dead Souls; and last, the inter-dialogue and inner interpretation between word and image, through which the illustrated book had achieved the aesthetics of grotesque realism. All those characteristics of carnival shown in this illustrated book, such as polyphony, degradation, topsy-turvy and the material bodily principal, are demonstrated in four sections of chapter three.
The aim of this thesis is to re-consider Chagall’s illustrations for Dead Souls from a new perspective and meanwhile contribute a different application of Bakhtin’s literary theory to the realm of pictorial images. Thus the dialogue between reader and work stems beneath the grotesque form of a joyous carnival, and a multiple interpretation of the polyphonic style of this illustrated book rouses against the similar social background of the author, the illustrator and the theorist. | en_US |