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.
Works
In Over Her Dead Body, Bronfen presents death as a fundamental deficit that is often negotiated over female bodies 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, Bronfen relates the "elusive, protean, and enigmatic psychosomatic disorder" 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 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 FreudianUncanny in these films. Her main thesis is that a "knowledge of the uncanniness of existence" 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, Bronfen analyses how Hollywood cinema and American television come to terms with US military history. From the "unfinished business" of civil war in Gone with the Wind and Gangs of New York to the "choreography of battle" in Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, Bronfen investigates the parallels between military and cinematic spectacle. In Night Passages, 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." Mad Men, Death and the American Dream is an analysis of Matthew Weiner’s award-winning TV showMad Men. According to Bronfen, the show not only successfully revives the past, but also comments on the state of the US nation and the role of the American Dream in the 20th century. In 2017, Elisabeth Bronfen's collection of essays in visual cultureCrossmappings 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. 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 adaptionRomeo + 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 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.
