Modernism and magic: experiments with spiritualism, theosophy and the occult

While modernism’s engagement with the occult has been approached by critics as the result of a loss of faith in representation, an attempt to draw on science as the primary discourse of modernity, or as a hidden history of ideas, Leigh Wilson argues that these discourses have at their heart a magica...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wilson, Leigh (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2013
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Links:http://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9780748631650/type/BOOK
http://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9780748631650/type/BOOK
http://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9780748631650/type/BOOK
Summary:While modernism’s engagement with the occult has been approached by critics as the result of a loss of faith in representation, an attempt to draw on science as the primary discourse of modernity, or as a hidden history of ideas, Leigh Wilson argues that these discourses have at their heart a magical practice which remakes the relationship between world and representation. As Wilson demonstrates, the courses of the occult are based on a magical mimesis which transforms the nature of the copy, from inert to vital, from dead to alive, from static to animated, from powerless to powerful. Wilson explores the aesthetic and political implications of this relationship in the work of those writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei M. Eisenstein
Item Description:Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015)
Physical Description:1 online resource (viii, 187 pages)
ISBN:9780748631650