The Fight In The Forest Visual Analysis

Cryss BlackWolf
Nagel
Engl&102 – Visual Analysis
May 13, 2016
Cultural Quicksilver
Images with attributes that correlate with the folk and fairy tales of the common people become vehicles for further expansion of social commentary, inciting deliberation and collaboration by those who have become active participants in their allegorical plotlines. This process allows illustrators the ability to convey feelings and attitudes commensurate to the social climate that often remain unreachable by literary means. We witness divergent romanticisms that flowing between Melissa Castrillon’s Wild and Golden Men and Hans Burgkmair’s The Fight in the Forest, two images used to augment the Wild Man and Goldener tales in various collections over the centuries.
These themes are centralized in the wild man’s commitment to intercessory intervention when the boy needs help, which begins in the heart space of introspection. These themes are emphasized in her image, and facilities a more progressive reinterpretation of the story. These progressive, virtuous acts ultimately lead to the wild man’s rebirth. It was as if an act of redemption was required for the wild man to enter from a place of slumber, through the chrysalis stage, and into a state of a transformed, free creature. At the end of this process-oriented path the wild man appears to the boy not as a wild man, but as a proud king and says, “I am Iron Hans and was turned into a wild man by a magic spell. But you released me from the spell, and now all the treasures that I possess shall be yours” (Grimm “Iron Hans (1857”). This allows the readers to challenge themselves to surrender to the forces that often bind and cage us, allowing us to learn the art of grace and gratitude as a progressive social
Lawrence Grossberg, a well-known American scholar of cultural studies, reflects on the importance of the study of culture. “Cultural studies has always been changing. This is part of what makes it so attractive: Cultural studies is always remaking itself as it responds to a world that is always being remade. This is possible, even necessary, precisely because it matters to cultural studies itself that the field remain open, with competing questions, projects, and positions” (Grossberg 1). This speaks to the fluidity of the cultural connections found through visual illustrations over the centuries. As societies and their stories rise from the ashes of their former selves, the stories and their protagonists evolve to reflect the lessons learned and to provide a better understanding our present cultural connections by circumnavigating our connections to both the past and to the future. One of the many tools to look at fluid, cultural connections is by using the critical lens of New Historicism, Cultural Studies which allows us to “reconnect at work with at the time period in which it was produced and intensify it with the cultural and political movements of the time