1. Academic career

2. Works

3. Select bibliography

4. References

Academic career

Elisabeth Bronfen studied German, English and Comparative literature at Radcliffe College and Harvard. From 1985 until 1992, she worked as an assistant at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and wrote her doctorate on Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage novels. Bronfen has held a chair at the University of Zurich since 1993, where she wrote her habilitation Over Her Dead Body (1992).

Works

In Over Her Dead Body (1992), Bronfen presents death as a fundamental deficit that is often negotiated over female bodies (be they dead or alive) in Western societies, citing Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and Vertigo. The literary and/or visual representation of death can therefore be read as a symptom of western culture, in which the female body epitomizes the Other whose death is imagined culturally.

In The Knotted Subject (1998), Bronfen relates the "elusive, protean, and enigmatic psychosomatic disorder"^[2] of hysteria to cultural works by Ann Raddcliffe, Anne Sexton, Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg, and Cindy Sherman. In her analysis, the human navel serves as a metaphor for both connection and detachment that is linked to the eponymous knotted subject of the hysteric because it too stems from a knot.

Home in Hollywood (1999/2004) is an analysis of the portrayal of psychological processes in film classics such as Rebecca, The Wizard of Oz, and The Searchers. In particular, Bronfen traces the depiction of the Freudian Uncanny in these films. Her main thesis is that a "knowledge of the uncanniness of existence"^[3] remains visible in these movies despite their attempts of making sense of reality by giving the viewers a metaphorical home in the cinematic world.

In Specters of War (2012), Bronfen analyses how Hollywood cinema and American television come to terms with US military history. From the "unfinished business"^[4] of civil war in Gone with the Wind and Gangs of New York to the "choreography of battle"^[5] in Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, Bronfen investigates the parallels between military and cinematic spectacle.

In Night Passages (2008/2013), Bronfen traces night as a trope from William Shakespeare through 19th-century realism to film noir and links the nocturnal to the primordial darkness that existed before the advent of in western culture’s "mythic narratives."^[6]

In 2017, Elisabeth Bronfen's collection of essays in visual culture Crossmappings (2009) will appear in English. Therein, Bronfen proposes a reading method of the same name that is based on mapping and comparing formal aspects of cultural texts such as character constellations or political themes. According to Bronfen, this method allows for new insights into both the earlier and the later text. Rolf Löchel calls crossmapping a comparative method that not only uncovers intertextualities but also carves out similar concerns of texts from different media such as literature, cinema, television and painting.^[8] Amongst others, Bronfen crossmaps Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper with the photographic oeuvre of Francesca Woodman, pop art with Baz Luhrmann’s Shakespeare adaption Romeo + Juliet, as well as Shakespeare’s Henriad with David Simon’s The Wire. In her teaching, Elisabeth Bronfen has further crossmapped Macbeth with Beau Willimon’s House of Cards^[9] and traced the rewritings of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hollywood from Max Reinhardt’s 1935 adaption via George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story and Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep to Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan.^[10]

Select bibliography

• Death and Representation (1993). Edited by Bronfen and Sarah W. Goodwin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. {{ISBN|9780801846274}}.
• Over her Dead Body (1992). Manchester: Manchester University Press. {{ISBN|9780719038273}}.
• The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (1998). Princeton: Princeton University Press. {{ISBN|9780691636849}}.
• Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text (1999). Manchester: Manchester University Press. {{ISBN|9780719083266}}.
• Feminist Consequences (2000). Edited by Bronfen and Misha Kavka. New York: Columbia University Press. {{ISBN|9780231117043}}.
• Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (2004). New York: Columbia University Press. {{ISBN|9780231121767}}.
• Specters of War: Hollywoods Engagement with Military Conflict (2012). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. {{ISBN|9780813553979}}.
• Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film (2013). Translated by Bronfen and David Brenner. New York: Columbia University Press. {{ISBN|9780231147989}}.
• Gothic Renaissance: A Reassessment (2014). Edited by Bronfen and Beate Neumeier. Manchester: Manchester University Press. {{ISBN|9780719088636}}.
• Mad Men, Death and the American Dream (2015). Zürich: Diaphanes. {{ISBN|9783037345504}}.
• Crossmappings (2017 [forthcoming]). London: I.B. Tauris.

References

• You Make the Rain Fall
• Youmanga
• YOU (manga magazine)
• You (manga magazine)
• Youmanity
• You May Not Kiss the Bride
• You May Now Kill the Bride
• You May Now Kiss the...Uh...Guy Who Receives
• You Me and Captain Longbridge
• You Me and Everyone We Know
• You, Me, And Everyone We Know
• You, Me, and Everyone We Know
• You, Me and Him
• You, Me and the Radio
• You, Me and the Radio (album)
• You Mean Everything to Me
• You Mean Everything to Me (song)
• You Mean the World to Me (David Houston song)
• Youmeatsix
• You Me At Six
• You Me at Six
• You me at six
• You, me aur hum
• You Me Bum Bum Train
• You Meihong