Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 26 October 2000
- ISBN 9780198184331
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages458 pages
- Size 242x165x30 mm
- Weight 865 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 8 pp halftone plates 0
Categories
Short description:
Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism centres on the evolution of ventriloquism from demonic phenomenon to popular entertainment in order to analyse the shifting cultural values attached to the natural and disembodied voice. It moves from late classical accounts of oracles through theological disputes about the nature of magical voices, medieval mysticism, early modern possession cases, philosophical debates about ventriloquism in the Enlightenment, the rise of ventriloquism as popular entertainment and the appearance of the dummy in the nineteenth century to discussions of twentieth-century technology and occult belief. The book is at the intersection of cultural history, literary theory, and aesthetics.
MoreLong 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.
erudite and broad in scope. Its strength is the way it links cultural phenomena in new ways ... Connor gives us an intelligent study of a domain of skilful cultural creativity, against a background of several millennia of appalling irrational behaviour.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Powers
What I Say Goes
Part II: Prophecies
Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle
Origen, Eustathius, and The Witch of Endor
Part III: Possessions
Hoc Est Corpus
The Exorcism of John Darrell
O, that Oh is the Devill: Glover and Harsnett
Part IV: Prodigies
Miracles and the Encyclopédie
Speaking Parts: Diderot and Les Bijoux indiscrets
The Abbé and the Ventriloque
The Dictate of Phrenzy: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland
Part V: Polyphonics
Ubiquitarical
At Home and Abroad: Monsieur Alexandre and Mr Matthews
Phenomena in the Philosophy of Sound: Mr Love
Writing the Voice
Part VI: Prosthetics
Vocal Reinforcement
Talking Heads, Automaton Ears
A Gramophone in Every Grave
Part VII: No Time Like the Present
No Time Like the Present
Works Cited
Index
