Modern Enchantments

Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic, During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's work gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people?

Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A history of “secular,” or non-supernatural, or entertainment magic as an important but neglected constituent of modern culture” (Nicholas Daly). Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During’s superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society’s image of itself. Praise for ModernEnchantment “During documents the extent to which magic and magical thinking have pervaded, and continue to pervade, secular life . . . the author examines 19th- and 20th-century theatrical magic and “commercial conjuring” with great sensitivity to the social and cultural context in the Western world. Equally fascinating is the analysis of magic and early film.” —R. Sugarman, Choice “A richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.” —Marina Warner, Financial Times “During moves confidently across three centuries of magic (and covers aspects of a few more besides). The sheer wealth of historical detail he provides is impressive, but no less impressive is the subtlety of his argumentation, and the suggestiveness of his claims . . . This extremely significant piece of work will appeal to literary critics, historians, and not least, devotees of magic.” —Nicholas Daly, author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914

Download or read book The Enchantment of Modern Life written by Jane Bennett and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century

Download or read book Enchantment written by Patrick Curry and published by Floris Books. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enchantment is a profound human experience. When we encounter wonder, awe or amazement, that is enchantment. Enchantment can reveal profound truths, lead to deep values and become central to a life well-lived. This unique book explores how enchantment plays out in a wide range of contexts -- in love, art, religion and learning, in food and drink, and perhaps most significantly in our relationship with the natural world. Patrick Curry argues that modernist attempts to undermine or dismiss enchantment as a delusion are not only misguided but dangerous, potentially leading to a disengagement with our world that could have disastrous consequences for our future on this planet.

Download or read book Enchantments of Modernity written by Saurabh Dube and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of modernity hinges on a break with the past, such as superstitions, medieval worlds, and hierarchical traditions. It follows that modernity suggests the disenchantment of the world, yet the processes of modernity also create their own enchantments in the mapping and making of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the essays in this edited volume eschew programmatic solutions, focusing instead in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects. It is in these ways that the volume attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to approach anew modernity's constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities.

Download or read book Decadent Enchantments written by Katherine Bergeron and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The oldest written tradition of European music, the art we know as Gregorian chant, is seen from an entirely new perspective in Katherine Bergeron's engaging and literate study. Bergeron traces the history of the Gregorian revival from its Romantic origins in a community of French monks at Solesmes, whose founder hoped to rebuild the moral foundation of French culture on the ruins of the Benedictine order. She draws out the parallels between this longing for a lost liturgy and the postrevolutionary quest for lost monuments that fueled the French Gothic revival, a quest that produced the modern concept of "restoration." Bergeron follows the technological development of the Gregorian restoration over a seventy-year period as it passed from the private performances of a monastic choir into the public commodities of printed books, photographs, and Gramophone records. She discusses such issues as architectural restoration, the modern history of typography, the uncanny power of the photographic image, and the authority of recorded sound. She also shows the extent to which different media shaped the modern image of the ancient repertory, an image that gave rise to conflicting notions not only of musical performance but of the very idea of music history.