Phantasmagoria
Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century
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Product details:
- Publisher Oxford University Press
- Date of Publication 12 October 2006
- ISBN 9780199299942
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages496 pages
- Size 240x160x40 mm
- Weight 899 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 8pp colour plates, numerous half-tones 0
Categories
Short description:
Phantasmagoria is a kaleidoscopic look at some of the central questions of modern thought: what does it mean to be human? In a rational age, why has our fascination with angels, fairies, ghosts, vampires, and zombies persisted? Exploring the wilder shores of fantasy interests, this book examines their relationship to our ideas about individuals and society.
MoreLong description:
Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book also discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the
perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; it uncovers a host of spirit forms -- angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies -- that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing idea about the self. Phantasmagoria also
tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features the many eminent men and women -- scientists and philosophers -- who in the Society of Psychical Research applied their
considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance séances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. The book shows how this often embarrassing story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in
psychology and physics.
Over a sequence of twenty-eight chapters, with over thirty illustrations in colour and black and white, Phantasmagoria thus tells an unexpected and often uncomfortable story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self as in the case of the zombie, a popular figure of soulessness, in modern times.
Warner's writing has a touch of Jorge Luis Borges's mischievousness.
Table of Contents:
Prologue
Introduction: The Logic of the Imaginary
I. Wax
Living Likenesses, Death Masks
Anatomies and Heroes: Madame Tussaud's
On the Threshold: Sleeping Beauties
II. Air
The Breath of Life
Winged Spirits and Sweet Airs
III. Clouds
Clouds of Glory
Fata Morgana
Very Like a Whale . . .
IV. Light
The Eye of the Imagination
Fancy's Images; Insubstantial Pageants
V. Shadow
Phantasmagoria or, Darkness Visible
The Origin of Painting or, the Corinthian Maid
VI. Mirror
The Danger in the Mirror: Narcissus
Double Vision
The Camera Steals the Soul
VII. Ghost
'Stay This Moment': Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Dodgson
Spectral Rappers, Psychic Photographers
Phantoms to the Test: The Society for Psychical Research
VIII. Ether
Soul Vibrations or, The Fluidic Invisible
Time Travel and Other Selves
Exotic Visitors, Multiple Lives
Touching the Unknown
IX. Ectoplasm
Materializing Mediums: The Quest for Ectoplasm
The Rorschach Test, or Dirty Pictures
X. Film
Nice Life, an Extra's
Disembodied Eyes: The Culture of Apocalypse
Our Zombies, Our Selves
Conclusion
