Download or read book Dumbstruck written by Steven Connor and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dumbstruck written by Steven Connor and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. It tracks the subject from its beginnings through early Christian writers, the voice in mysticism witchcraft and the figure of the ventriloquist.
Download or read book Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism written by Steven Connor and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-10-26 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Book of Skin written by Steven Connor and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the largest and perhaps the most important organ of our body—it covers our fragile inner parts, defines our social identities, and channels our sensory experiences. And yet we rarely give a thought. With The Book of Skin, Steven Connor aims to change all that, offering an intriguing cultural history of skin. Connor first examines physical issues such as leprosy, skin pigmentation, cancer, blushing, and attenuations of erotic touch. He also explains why specific colors symbolize certain emotions, such as green for envy or yellow for cowardice, as well as why skin is the focus of destructive rage in many people’s violent fantasies. The Book of Skin then probes into how skin has been such a powerfully symbolic terrain in photography, religious iconography, cinema, and literature. From the Turin shroud to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to plastic surgery, The Book of Skin expertly examines the role of skin in Western culture. A compelling read that penetrates well beyond skin-deep, The Book of Skin validates James Joyce’s declaration that “modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul.” “Richly conceived and elaborately thought out. No flicker of meaning has escaped Connor’s ferocious, all-seeing eye.”—Guardian
Download or read book A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age written by David Howes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 20th century, many aspects of life became 'a matter of perception' in the wake of the multiplication of media, stylistic experimentation, and the rise of multiculturalism. Life sped up as a result of new modes of transportation – automobiles and airplanes – and communication – telephones and personal computers – which emphasized the rapid movement of people and ideas. The proliferation of synthetic products and simulated experiences, from artificial flavors to video games, in turn, created heady virtual worlds of sensation. This progressive mediation and acceleration of sensation, along with the sensory and environmental pollution it often spawned, also sparked various countertrends, such as the 'back to nature' movement, the craft movement, slow food and alternative medicine. This volume shows how attending to the sensory dynamics of the modern age yields many fresh insights into the intertwined processes which gave the 20th century its particular feel of technological prowess and gaudy artificiality. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.
Download or read book Ventriloquism Performance and Contemporary Art written by Jennie Hirsh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art volume calls attention to the unexpected prevalence of ventriloqual motifs and strategies within contemporary art. Engaging with issues of voice, embodiment, power, and projection, the case studies assembled in this volume span a range of media from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, performance, architecture, and video. Importantly, they both examine and enact ventriloqual practices, and do so as a means of interrogating and performatively bearing out contemporary conceptions of authorship, subjectivity, and performance. Put otherwise, the chapters in this book oscillate seamlessly between art history, theory, and criticism through both analytical and performative means. Across twelve essays on ventriloquism in contemporary art, the authors, who are curators, historians, and artists, shine light on this outdated practice, repositioning it as a conspicuous and meaningful trend within a range of artistic practices today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, media studies, performance, museum/curatorial studies, and theater.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Sound Memory and the Senses written by Joy Damousi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction: Leaning In -- 1 Sound Studies Today: Where Are We Going? -- PART I Sound and Voice -- 2 "The World Wanderings of a Voice": Exhibiting the Cylinder Phonograph in Australasia -- 3 "Are You Sitting Comfortably?": The Changing Position of Storytellers on Early Australian Radio -- 4 Lindbergh's Voice -- 5 Noisy Classrooms and the "Quiet Corner": The Modern School, Sound and the Senses -- PART II Sound and Violence -- 6 Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Voice, Power and Sexual Violence in Penal New South Wales -- 7 Startling Reports: Gunfire as Social Soundscape in Early Colonial Australia -- 8 Sounds and Silence of War: Dresden and Paris during World War II -- 9 Hearing the 1965-66 Indonesian Anti-Communist Repression: Sensory History and Its Possibilities -- 10 "For a Few Seconds, Imagine": An Aural Experience of Six Days of Terror at the Stadium of Chile, 12-17 September 1973 -- PART III Sensory Memories -- 11 "Big Smoke Stacks": Competing Memories of the Sounds and Smells of Industrial Heritage -- 12 Intimate Strangers: Multisensorial Memories of Working in the Home -- 13 Botanical Memory: Materiality, Affect and Western Australian Plant Life -- 14 "If I Ever Hear It, It Takes Me Straight Back There": Music, Autobiographical Memory, Space and Place -- 15 Seeing in Black and White: Visualizing "Shadow Sisters" among Metaphors of Light and Dark -- Contributors -- Index
Download or read book Beyond Words written by Steven Connor and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beyond Words, Steven Connor seeks to understand spoken human language outside words, a realm that encompasses the sounds we make that bring depth, meaning, and confusion to communication. Plunging into the connotations and uses associated with particular groups of vocal utterances—the guttural, the dental, the fricative, and the sibilant—he reveals the beliefs, the myths, and the responses that surround the growls, stutters, ums, ers, and ahs of everyday language. Beyond Words goes outside of linguistics and phonetics to focus on the popular conceptions of what language is, rather than what it actually is or how it works. From the moans and sobs of human grief to playful linguistic nonsense, Connor probes the fringes and limits of human language—and our definition of “voice” and meaning—to challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to communicate and where we find meaning in language. By engaging with vocal sounds and tics usually trivialized or ignored, Beyond Words presents a startling and fascinating new way to engage with language itself.
Download or read book Marcabru written by Marcabrun and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2000 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the earliest troubadours, Marcabru was a remarkable artist and entertainer, and a figure of crucial importance to the development of the European courtly lyric. His blistering attacks on contemporary court society reveal an intellectual insider's view of the clash between clerical morality and the emerging secular ethics of love and courtesy. His fervent, often acerbic engagement with contemporary events also provides a unique southern perspective on political upheavals and crusading movements in twelfth-century Occitania and northern Spain. This new critical edition, the first for nearly 100 years, makes his complete corpus accessible to a wide readership, supplying translations, full critical apparatus, and copious textual notes, with a substantial glossary of Marcabru's extraordinarily inventive vocabulary. The introduction supplies historical information, discussion of the poet's language, and an analysis of the manuscript transmission. It also raises fresh issues of troubadour versification techniques in this formative period, and engages in a new way with the current debate about editorial methodology and medieval textual criticism. Leaflet blurb - see AN]
Download or read book Media Ventriloquism written by Jaimie Baron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word "ventriloquism" has traditionally referred to the act of throwing one's voice into an object that appears to speak. Media Ventriloquism repurposes the term to reflect our complex vocal relationship with media technologies. The 21st century has offered an array of technological means to separate voice from body, practices which have been used for good and ill. We currently zoom about the internet, in conversations full of audio glitches, using tools that make it possible to live life at a distance. Yet at the same time, these technologies subject us to the potential for audiovisual manipulation. But this voice/body split is not new. Radio, cinema, television, video games, digital technologies, and other media have each fundamentally transformed the relationship between voice and body in myriad and often unexpected ways. This book explores some of these experiences of ventriloquism and considers the political and ethical implications of separating bodies from voices. The essays in the collection, which represent a variety of academic disciplines, demonstrate not only how particular bodies and voices have been (mis)represented through media ventriloquism, but also how marginalized groups - racialized, gendered, and queered, among them - have used media ventriloquism to claim their agency and power.
Download or read book Pet Projects written by Elizabeth Young and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism. Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies. With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.
Download or read book The Sound Studies Reader written by Jonathan Sterne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sound Studies Reader is a groundbreaking anthology blending recent work that self-consciously describes itself as 'sound studies' with earlier and lesser known scholarship on sound.
Download or read book Poetry Publishing and Visual Culture from Late Modernism to the Twenty First Century written by Natalie Pollard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.
Download or read book Postopera Reinventing the Voice Body written by Jelena Novak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson), and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms 'postoperas'. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies. That dissection shows how the singing body acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
Download or read book I Am a Monument written by Aron Vinegar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Learning from Las Vegas, originally published by the MIT Press in 1972, was one of the most influential and controversial architectural books of its era. Thirty-five years later, it remains a perennial bestseller and a definitive theoretical text. Its authorsاarchitects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenourاfamously used the Las Vegas Strip to argue the virtues of the "ordinary and ugly" above the "heroic and original" qualities of architectural modernism. Learning from Las Vegas not only moved architecture to the center of cultural debates, it changed our ideas about what architecture was and could be. In this provocative rereading of an iconic text, Aron Vinegar argues that Learning from Las Vegas is not only of historical interest but of absolute relevance to current critical debates in architectural and visual culture. Vinegar argues that to read Learning from Las Vegas only as an exemplary postmodernist textاto understand it, for example, as a call for pastiche or as ironic provocationاis to underestimate its deeper critical and ethical meaning, and to miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression and the deadpan, that runs through the text. Vinegar's close attention to the graphic design of Learning from Las Vegas, and his fresh interpretations of now canonical images from the book such as the Duck, the Decorated Shed, and the "recommendation for a monument," make his book unique. Perhaps most revealing is his close analysis of the differences between the first 1972 edition, designed for the MIT Press by Muriel Cooper, and the "revised" edition of 1977, which was radically stripped down and largely redesigned by Denise Scott Brown. The dialogue between the two editions continues with this book, where for the first time the two versions of Learning from Las Vegas are read comparatively."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book Articulate Objects written by Aura Satz and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do objects 'speak' to us? What happens to authorship when voice is projected into inanimate objects? How can one articulate an object into speech? Is the inarticulate body necessarily silent? These are just some of the questions brought up by this unique and unusual collection of essays, which presents subjects and categories often overlooked by the disciplines of art history, visual culture, theatre history and comparative literature. Drawing from and expanding upon the 'Performing Objects, Animating Images' academic session run by the Henry Moore Institute at the Association of Art Historians conference, held in London in 2003, this book presents thirteen essays that bring together a multidisciplinary approach to the animated object. Contributions range from literal accounts of magic lanterns, tableaux vivants, puppets and ventriloquist dummies, to the more abstract notions of voice displacement in audio art and authorship projection in writing machines. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds in art history, cultural history, comparative literature, and artistic, theatrical and curatorial practice, and all tackle the issue of 'articulate objects' from a range of lively and unexpected perspectives.
Download or read book Indian Puppets written by Sampa Ghosh and published by Abhinav Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puppetry Originated In India And Travelled Across The Seven Seas To The Eastern And Western World As Vouched By Many Scholars. Puppets Dated Back To A Period Well Before Bharata S Natya Shastra And Have Continued Unabated Throughout The Centuries In Almost All Indian States. Puppetry Is One Enduring Form, Which Has Entertained Masses And Educated People. The Famous Puppeteers Of Rajasthan Are Really Acrobats, Who Only Put On Puppet Shows When They Move Out Of Villages. These And A Thousand Other Scintillating Facts Come Out Of This Exciting Book For The Reader S Entertainment And Elucidation. Puppets Are By No Means For Only Children, -- As The Puppeteers Of Orissa Sing And Dance About The Romantic Love Of Radha And Krishna, And Keralan Puppets Narrate Kathakali Stories In The Same Make-Up And Costumes.The Book Aims At Giving A Connected Account Of The Indian Puppets: Their Variety, Their Multiple Functions, Their Craft, Their Animation And Their Connections With Other Related Arts In Five Separate Parts. The Book Also Contains For The First Time In Any Book On Puppetry -- Four Important Appendices: Museums In India Containing Puppets, Directory Of Indian Puppeteers, Global Bibliography On Puppets And A Relevant Glossary. The World Of Indian Puppets Is Seen In Vivid Colours With Scores Of Coloured Photographs And Many Line-Drawings And Half-Tone Pictures --- In Their Many-Sided Splendour: Variety Of The Glove, Rod, String, Shadow, And Human Puppets And A Myriad Background Stories Of The Puppet-Masters And Their Imaginative Landscape Of Free Creativity.
