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Author: Steven Connor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of 'seeming to speak where one is not', speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel Steven Connor's wide-ranging, restlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. He tracks his subject from its first recorded beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the fulminations of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination, the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, during the Enlightenment. He retrieves the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like telephone, radio, film, and internet. Learned but lucid, brimming with anecdote and insight, this is much more than an archaeology of one of the most regularly derided but tenaciously enduring of popular arts. It is also a series of virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.
Author: Steven Connor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of 'seeming to speak where one is not', speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel Steven Connor's wide-ranging, restlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. He tracks his subject from its first recorded beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the fulminations of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination, the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, during the Enlightenment. He retrieves the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like telephone, radio, film, and internet. Learned but lucid, brimming with anecdote and insight, this is much more than an archaeology of one of the most regularly derided but tenaciously enduring of popular arts. It is also a series of virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.
Author: Steven Connor
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861896409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 570
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Book Description
It is the largest and perhaps the most important organ of our body—it covers our fragile inner parts, defines our social identities, and channels our sensory experiences. And yet we rarely give a thought. With The Book of Skin, Steven Connor aims to change all that, offering an intriguing cultural history of skin. Connor first examines physical issues such as leprosy, skin pigmentation, cancer, blushing, and attenuations of erotic touch. He also explains why specific colors symbolize certain emotions, such as green for envy or yellow for cowardice, as well as why skin is the focus of destructive rage in many people’s violent fantasies. The Book of Skin then probes into how skin has been such a powerfully symbolic terrain in photography, religious iconography, cinema, and literature. From the Turin shroud to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to plastic surgery, The Book of Skin expertly examines the role of skin in Western culture. A compelling read that penetrates well beyond skin-deep, The Book of Skin validates James Joyce’s declaration that “modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul.” “Richly conceived and elaborately thought out. No flicker of meaning has escaped Connor’s ferocious, all-seeing eye.”—Guardian
Author: Jennie Hirsh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000817326
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art volume calls attention to the unexpected prevalence of ventriloqual motifs and strategies within contemporary art. Engaging with issues of voice, embodiment, power, and projection, the case studies assembled in this volume span a range of media from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, performance, architecture, and video. Importantly, they both examine and enact ventriloqual practices, and do so as a means of interrogating and performatively bearing out contemporary conceptions of authorship, subjectivity, and performance. Put otherwise, the chapters in this book oscillate seamlessly between art history, theory, and criticism through both analytical and performative means. Across twelve essays on ventriloquism in contemporary art, the authors, who are curators, historians, and artists, shine light on this outdated practice, repositioning it as a conspicuous and meaningful trend within a range of artistic practices today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, media studies, performance, museum/curatorial studies, and theater.
Author: Steven Connor
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652824
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
From keys and handkerchiefs to sweets and rubber bands, the curious objects we surround ourselves with, though often seemingly mundane, have a magical quality. Their surprising power to disturb, soothe, seduce or absorb give these quirky objects histories and meanings we rarely ponder. Yet we would be lost without them. Take bags, for example. Why do most women carry handbags, while men rely on pockets? Why do so many houses have bags of bags? And why do we 'let the cat out the bag' or 'give someone the sack'? What significance do our bags hold for us? In this highly imaginative and entertaining book, Steven Connor embarks on a historical, philosophical and linguistic journey that explores our relationships with the curious things with which we have a forgotten but daily intimacy.
Author: Jaimie Baron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197563627
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
"Media Ventriloquism repurposes the term "ventriloquism," which has traditionally referred to the act of throwing one's voice into an object that appears to speak, to reflect our complex vocal relationship with media technologies. Indeed, media technologies have the potential to separate voice from body and to constitute new relationships between them that could scarcely have been imagined before such technologies' invention and mass circulation. Radio, cinema, television, video games, digital technologies, and other media have each fundamentally transformed the relationship between voice and body in myriad and often unexpected ways. Our volume interrogates the categorical definitions of voice and body as they operate within mediated environments, exploring the experiences of ventriloquism facilitated by media technologies and theorizing some of the political and ethical implications of separating bodies from voices. We build in particular on Steven Connor's notion of the vocalic body, which he coined to identify an imaginary body that is created and maintained primarily through voice. In modifying Connor's term to theorize the "technovocalic body," we focus our study on cases in which the relationship between voice and body has been modified specifically by media technologies. The essays in the collection demonstrate not only how particular bodies and voices have been been (mis)represented through media ventriloquism but also how marginalized groups - racialized, gendered, queered, etc. - have used media ventriloquism to claim their agency and power"--
Author: Charles Brockden Brown
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 162466203X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1677
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Book Description
On Wieland; or the Transformation: "An impressive edition . . . the most thoroughly satisfying historical and literary contextualization for the novel that I've ever encountered. Shapiro and Barnard offer a rich transatlantic artistic and ideological context that helps pull the whole novel into coherent focus. The footnotes to the novel are incredibly thorough, helpful, and interesting. . . . This Hackett edition of Wieland [is] the freshest and most topical of those now available." --Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University On Ormond; or, the Secret Witness: "Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro have produced an awesome edition of Brown's Ormond by providing copious explanatory notes and helpful documentation of the essential historical context of feminist, radical, egalitarian, and abolitionist expression. Oh, ye patriots, read it and learn!" --Peter Linebaugh, University of Toledo On Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793: "This new edition of Arthur Mervyn far exceeds any previous version of this remarkable American novel. Through exhaustive archival research, the editors have produced a reliable text constructed within the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious contexts of a society informing Brown's efforts to capture and preserve the formation of the early republic for generations of readers and cultural historians. This vital text is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the United States." --Emory Elliott, University Professor, University of California-Riverside On Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker: "This is now the edition of choice for those of us who teach Brown's fascinating Edgar Huntly. Barnard and Shapiro explore the relevant historical, cultural, and literary backgrounds in their illuminating Introduction; they skillfully annotate the text; they provide useful and up-to-date bibliographies; and they append a number of revealing primary texts for further cultural contextualization. This edition will help to stimulate new thinking about race, empire, and sexuality in Brown's prescient novel of the American frontier." --Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland
Author: Giorgio Biancorosso
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199705496
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the challenges of representing the listening experience on screen. While music has played a central role in film narrative since the conception of moving pictures, the representation of music listening has remained a special occurrence. In Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a reverential concertgoer, music analyst, or gallery dweller, this book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of established modes of listening, but also an agent in the development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional character through real and shared listening practices.
Author: Arne Lunde
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295800844
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Nordic Exposures explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema between and during the two world wars. Scandinavian identities could seem mutable and constructed at moments, while at other times they were deployed as representatives of an essential, biological, and natural category. As Northern European Protestants, Scandinavian immigrants and emigres assimilated into the mainstream rights and benefits of white American identity with comparatively few barriers or obstacles. Yet Arne Lunde demonstrates that far from simply manifesting a normative unmarked whiteness, Scandinavianness in mass-immigration America and in Hollywood cinema of the twentieth century could be hyperwhite, provisionally off-white, or not even white at all. Lunde investigates key silent films, such as Technicolor's The Viking (1928), Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924), and Mauritz Stiller's Hotel Imperial (1927). The crises of Scandinavian foreign voice and the talkie revolution are explored in Greta Garbo's first sound film, Anna Christie (1930). The author also examines Warner Oland's long career of Asian racial masquerade (most famously as Chinese detective Charlie Chan), as well as Hollywood's and Third Reich Cinema's war over assimilating the Nordic female star in the personae of Garbo, Sonja Henie, Ingrid Bergman, Kristina Soderbaum, and Zarah Leander.
Author: Nicole C. Dittmer
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786839725
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
• Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic uncovers neglected Gothic texts of the nineteenth century which are crucial in understanding working-class popular culture. • The approach of this study of penny dreadfuls is vast and eclectic, ranging from data-driven publication data to close textual analysis of these texts to adaptations of penny fiction. • This title covers a broad range of penny texts, some of which have never before been written on.
Author: Grace Nono
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501760106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Babaylan Sing Back depicts the embodied voices of Native Philippine ritual specialists popularly known as babaylan. These ritual specialists are widely believed to have perished during colonial times, or to survive on the margins in the present-day. They are either persecuted as witches and purveyors of superstition, or valorized as symbols of gender equality and anticolonial resistance. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and in the Philippine diaspora, Grace Nono's deep engagement with the song and speech of a number of living ritual specialists demonstrates Native historical agency in the 500th year anniversary of the contact between the people of the Philippine Islands and the European colonizers.
