The image between appearance and being : iconic vision in Ukrainian and Russian worlds

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
This dissertation is a study of iconicity across three sites within the Slavic world. Taking the iconographic tradition of Eastern Christianity as its jumping off point, the project conceptualizes the image through a particular set of ethical and ontological grammars in which the image participates in an economy of formation rather than representation, and in which it is effective rather than descriptive. As such, the problem of iconic vision is not reducible to the phenomenology of optics. Rather, following these grammars, the dissertation reprises the question of the image as delineated by the viewing subject's relationship to it as an object of veneration. The project traces these questions across the following topoi: the first chapter studies a particular moment of reformation and modernization at the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium during the 17th-18th centuries. It argues that the resulting shifts in Ukrainian iconography demonstrate a significant remapping of the visual field, a change which is obscured when it is narrativized through projects of political, national, or religious identity which are premised upon a progressivist temporal break. The second chapter takes up the writings of Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), first tracing the author's addresses to what I term a 'counterfeit' tradition of iconography together with his program for its rehabilitation, which pivots upon considerations of style and medium. It then shows how Leskov's desire to purify the iconographic tradition in some ways mirrors the "near-deification" of the wood and paint of the icon which he ascribes to the Old Believers in "The Sealed Angel", a tale narrated in the geographic and social hinterlands (Kyiv, Old Belief) of the Russian Empire. The third and final chapter looks to the filmography and writings of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), arguing that the filmmaker stages the impasse of the Kantian subject—whose transcendental ego ties the split domains of the aesthetic and the rational—in his filmography. In doing so, Tarkovsky reprises the question posed by this dissertation: that of the image, its beholder, and the real to which it stands in relation.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource
Extent 1 online resource.
Place California
Place [Stanford, California]
Publisher [Stanford University]
Copyright date 2023; ©2023
Publication date 2023; 2023
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Author Storoshchuk, Daria Chrystyna
Degree supervisor Safran, Gabriella, 1967-
Thesis advisor Safran, Gabriella, 1967-
Thesis advisor Ilchuk, Yuliya
Thesis advisor Pentcheva, Bissera V
Degree committee member Ilchuk, Yuliya
Degree committee member Pentcheva, Bissera V
Associated with Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Subjects

Genre Theses
Genre Text

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Daria Storoshchuk.
Note Submitted to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Thesis Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023.
Location https://purl.stanford.edu/yn975pj4138

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2023 by Daria Chrystyna Storoshchuk
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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