Origins, identity, home: Sites of subjectivity and displaced narratives in Marguerite Duras and Wim Wenders

This dissertation examines the crisis of subjectivity central to the work of contemporary French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and German filmmaker Wim Wenders--a topic of comparative study never before undertaken despite striking parallels between the two artists. In the wake of temporal or historical rupture, both Duras and Wenders deconstruct and reconstruct subjectivity in spatial terms. Duras scatters subjectivity across a range of sites: the desiring body, the psychological space between characters, the space of the home and the city. Wenders looks to place as lost origin, a potential source of identity and site of the reconstruction of the subject. The theoretical perspective here is largely informed by post-structuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to literature, film, and photography. I draw upon the work of Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Benjamin, and Baudrillard, among others.; Duras and Wenders serve as foils to one another in this study: Duras' delight in a careful undoing of subjectivity through images, language, and narration underscores Wenders' desire for images, language, and narratives to restore subjectivity and identity. I present this contrast through the first two chapters, parallel studies of Wenders and Duras, respectively, in which I discuss a group of texts and films including Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, L'Amant, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, and Written in the West. In the third chapter I examine more closely Duras' and Wenders' use of specific spatial figures (houses, walls, water, borders) to construct or deconstruct the subject in such films as Nathalie Granger, Hiroshima, mon amour, The American Friend, and Wings of Desire.; The ultimate thrust of this study is to remove Duras and Wenders from narrow categories of nationality, genre, and media. The study opens the crisis of subjectivity in their work to consideration within a broader late-twentieth-century European cultural context.