Stunningly Dead. Comparative Analysis of the Central Female Heroines in David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' and 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me' and Toni Morrison's 'Jazz'

Seminar paper from the year 2024 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (English and American Studies), course: Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Music in American Literature, language: English, abstract: This term paper compares two texts - the television series 'Twin Peaks' by Mark Frost and David Lynch (released in 1990-1991) taken together as a whole with Lynch's following prequel 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me' (1992) and the novel Jazz (1992) by Toni Morrison - through the prism of two theoretical findings of German cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen. First, this is her concept of 'crossmappings', formulated and applied as a method of analysis in the book Crossmapping. Essays zur visuellen Kultur (2011). Second, this is her theory regarding the depiction of a dead female body in arts that, seemingly counter-intuitively, is a highly widespread artistic image to which the perceiver responds rather with fascination than with terror. This idea was represented and comprehensively described in the earlier book Over her Dead Body (Bronfen 1992), whose central subject is the connection between death, femininity, and artistic representation.