Soma, psyche, corpse, and gaze: Perception and vision in Arthur Schnitzler's early prose fiction

After setting Arthur Schnitzler's visual aesthetics in dialogue with key issues in visual culture and mapping links between cinematic and literary practices, this article explores vision as a preeminent poetic strategy in his early prose works Sterben (1894), "Der Ehrentag" (1897), and "Das neue Lied" (1905). It argues that these texts mark a "pictorial turn" (Mitchell) in Vienna modernism. Through a dynamic interplay of visual, narrative, and social practices, they present an eloquent cultural critique of aestheticizing death, along with mental and physical illness. Close textual analysis focuses on Schnitzler's techniques of rendering the human body and psyche visually by graphically depicting the progress of terminal illness, depression, and disability.