Title
The Secret Life of Puppets / Victoria Nelson.
ISBN
9780674041417
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2009]
Copyright
©2003
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (368 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/9780674041417 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
809.3/8762
Summary
In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
Frontmatter
Contents
Preface
One. grotto, an opening
Two. Early adventures of the earthly gods
Three. the puppet tractates
Four. the strange history of the american fantastic
Five. H. P. lovecraft and the great heresies
Six. symmes hole, or the south polar grotto
Seven. is this real or am i crazy?
Eight. Two old birds and their new feathers
Nine. The new expressionists
Ten. The hermeticon of umbertus E.
Eleven. The great twentiethcentury puppet upgrade
Twelve. The door in the sky
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
