Techniques of Narration, Notation, and Subjection in Döblin’s “Die Tänzerin und der Leib”

The article offers a reading of Alfred Döblin’s early story, “The Dancer and the Body,” focusing on the relation between its narrative techniques and the disciplinary process of subject formation. Specifically, it analyzes the technique of notating or transcribing movement as both a core motif in the text and as a medial function performed by its narrator. The article connects this technique to psychiatric practices of recording and visualizing movement around 1900 as well as to Döblin’s poetological reflections on the potential optical effect of prose and its relation to film. While Döblin frames movement notation as a narrative technique capable of dispensing with the subject, this essay argues that it remains implicated in the process of subjection. To show this, the articles focuses on the relation between textualizing the body’s movement and subjecting it to control.