Pictorial Constructions of Meaning – New Game Rules for the Downfall. Notes on the Visual Reception of the Nibelungenlied
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Keywords

Song of the Nibelungs illustrations manuscript interpretation image-text relationship death of Siegfried

How to Cite

Karnatz, S. (2021). Pictorial Constructions of Meaning – New Game Rules for the Downfall. Notes on the Visual Reception of the Nibelungenlied. Corpus Mundi, 2(1), 123-138. https://doi.org/10.46539/cmj.v2i1.38

Abstract

The author analyses the visualization of the characters of the German heroic epic "Song of the Nibelungs". The way the illustrators depict the bodies of the characters, what poses their bodies are given, against what kind of landscape the action is placed, how many agents are there and what exactly they do – all of these can become active semantic factors. The intentional intrusion into the plot by some artists not only provides a new context for perception – in fact it gives a different or additional meaning to the text. Sometimes the semantics of illustrations is in clear contradiction with the events of the plot – the author shows how and why this happens, what meanings are encrypted in the illustrations of the poem, how images influence the recipients’ perception of the text.

https://doi.org/10.46539/cmj.v2i1.38
pdf (Русский)

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