Seeing things : from Shakespeare to Pixar / Alan Ackerman.

Seeing things : from Shakespeare to Pixar / Alan Ackerman.

9781442643642
1442643641
9781442612105 (pbk.)
144261210X (pbk.)

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, [2011]

©2011

English

x, 169 pages ; 23 cm

PN56.V543 A35 2011

700.1/05

"A technological revolution has changed the way we see things. The storytelling media employed by Pixar Animation Studios, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare differ greatly, yet these creators share a collective fascination with the nebulous boundary between material objects and our imaginative selves. How do the acts of seeing and believing remain linked? Alan Ackerman charts the dynamic history of interactions between showing and knowing in Seeing Things, a richly interdisciplinary study which illuminates changing modes of perception and modern representational media. Seeing Things demonstrates that the airy nothings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Ghost in Hamlet, and soulless bodies in Beckett's media experiments, alongside Toy Story's digitally animated toys, all serve to illustrate the modern problem of visualizing, as Hamlet put it, 'that within which passes show.' Ackerman carefully analyses such ghostly appearances and disappearances across cultural forms and contexts from the early modern period to the present, investigating the tension between our distrust of shadows and our abiding desire to believe in invisible realities. Seeing Things provides a fresh and surprising cultural history through theatrical, verbal, pictorial, and cinematic representations."--P. [i].

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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