Download or read book Culture and Enchantment written by Mark A. Schneider and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-12-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weber viewed modern life as disenchanted, an arena from which scientific inquiry had banished magic. In contrast, Mark Schneider argues intriguingly that enchantment—the sense that we are confronted by inexplicable phenomena—persists in the world today, although it has shifted from the natural to the cultural arena. Culture and Enchantment shows that students of culture today operate in social and intellectual circumstances similar to those of seventeenth-century natural philosophers. Just as Newton was drawn to alchemy, scholars today are fascinated by ghostly and mercurial agents thought to account for the meanings of cultural entities. For interpretive disciplines, Schneider suggests, meaning often behaves behaves as mysteriously as the apparitions pursued by centuries ago by natural philosophers. He demonstrates this using two case studies from anthropology: Clifford Geertz's description of Balinese cockfights and Yoruba statuary, and Claude Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths. These provide a basis for actively engaging disputes over the meaning and interpretation of culture. Culture and Enchantment will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience in anthropology, sociology, history, history and sociology of science, culture studies, and literary theory. Schneider's provocative arguments will make this book a fulcrum in the continuing debate over the nature and prospects of cultural inquiry.
Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts--and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows--affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.
Download or read book Images at Work written by David Morgan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images can be studied in many ways--as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images are often something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independent of human will. Images come alive--they move us to action, calm us, reveal the power of the divine, change the world around us. In these instances, we need an alternative model for exploring what is at work, one that recognizes the presence of images as objects that act on us. Building on his previous innovative work in visual and religious studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the human mind can be enchanted by images in Images at Work. In carefully crafted arguments, Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned and recognized by human beings for their capacity to engage us. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment, as described, is not a violation of cosmic order, but a very natural way that the mind animates the world around it. His groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humans create culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These various agents--human and non-human, material, geographic, and spiritual--become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to images and to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work in visual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to secular icons like Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have a power of us in ways we can't always describe.
Download or read book Culture and Enchantment written by Mark A. Schneider and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-12-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weber viewed modern life as disenchanted, an arena from which scientific inquiry had banished magic. In contrast, Mark Schneider argues intriguingly that enchantment—the sense that we are confronted by inexplicable phenomena—persists in the world today, although it has shifted from the natural to the cultural arena. Culture and Enchantment shows that students of culture today operate in social and intellectual circumstances similar to those of seventeenth-century natural philosophers. Just as Newton was drawn to alchemy, scholars today are fascinated by ghostly and mercurial agents thought to account for the meanings of cultural entities. For interpretive disciplines, Schneider suggests, meaning often behaves behaves as mysteriously as the apparitions pursued by centuries ago by natural philosophers. He demonstrates this using two case studies from anthropology: Clifford Geertz's description of Balinese cockfights and Yoruba statuary, and Claude Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths. These provide a basis for actively engaging disputes over the meaning and interpretation of culture. Culture and Enchantment will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience in anthropology, sociology, history, history and sociology of science, culture studies, and literary theory. Schneider's provocative arguments will make this book a fulcrum in the continuing debate over the nature and prospects of cultural inquiry.
Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A history of “secular,” or non-supernatural, or entertainment magic as an important but neglected constituent of modern culture” (Nicholas Daly). Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During’s superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society’s image of itself. Praise for ModernEnchantment “During documents the extent to which magic and magical thinking have pervaded, and continue to pervade, secular life . . . the author examines 19th- and 20th-century theatrical magic and “commercial conjuring” with great sensitivity to the social and cultural context in the Western world. Equally fascinating is the analysis of magic and early film.” —R. Sugarman, Choice “A richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.” —Marina Warner, Financial Times “During moves confidently across three centuries of magic (and covers aspects of a few more besides). The sheer wealth of historical detail he provides is impressive, but no less impressive is the subtlety of his argumentation, and the suggestiveness of his claims . . . This extremely significant piece of work will appeal to literary critics, historians, and not least, devotees of magic.” —Nicholas Daly, author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914
Download or read book The Politics of Enchantment written by J. David Black and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture? Today’s culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling — they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone’s concern. Some of the best answers might be found in an unexpected source: Romanticism. Too often we bring the values of the Enlightenment, particularly that of reason, to critique phenomena not inherently rational, such as pop culture or the Internet. This means that much criticism of current culture already has an intellectual foundation antagonistic to it — inviting postmodern arguments that suggest history has ended and reality is an illusion. In contrast, Romanticism, a cultural movement founded in Germany and England during the late eighteenth century, offers us an archive of concepts surprisingly sensitive to these problems. The Romantics were poets, dreamers, and politicians who advanced ideas that anticipated much contemporary thinking. David Black has organized these ideas systematically, and has then applied them to key issues in communications, such as representation, audience, and the information society, as well as to significant debates in cultural studies. As a result, The Politics of Enchantment offers a new theory of media and culture that is grounded in intellectual history, yet as feverishly current as the latest digital device.
Download or read book Visions of Enchantment written by Daniel Zamani and published by Fulgur Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Antiquity, the idea of the artist as a magician, trickster and powerful creator of new realities has established itself as a fertile idea in the discussion of image-making. The conjuring of illusions, the inherent link between the material and the spiritual and the wish to make the invisible visible are all part of this wider discourse. Visions of Enchantment looks at the fascinating intersections between esotericism and visual culture through a decidedly cross-cultural lens, with topics ranging from talismanic magic and the Renaissance exploration of alchemy, through to the role of magic in modern art and 20th century experimental film.00The essays offered in 'Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Magic and Visual Culture' have been selected from papers presented at a major international conference at the University of Cambridge in 2014. It includes work by some of the leading scholars in Western Esotericism including Antoine Faivre, M.E. Warlick and Deanna Petherbridge. It attests to the vibrant role that magic and the occult play in cutting-edge research across a wide variety of the arts and humanities today.
Download or read book Enchantment written by Jean Starobinski and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines some figures of seduction as they have appeared over the course of opera's history." --introd.
Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
Download or read book The Philosophy of Enchantment written by R. G. Collingwood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the long-awaited publication of a set of writings by the British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood on critical, anthropological, and cultural themes only hinted at in his previously available work. At the centre of the book are six chapters of a study of folktale and magic, composed by Collingwood in the mid-1930s and intended for development into a book. Here Collingwood applies the principles of his philosophy of history to problems in thelong-term evolution of human society and culture. This is preceded, in Part I, by a range of contextualizing material on such topics as the relations between music and poetry, the nature of language, the value of Jane Austen's novels, the philosophy of art, and the relations between aesthetic theory andartistic practice. Part III of the volume consists of two essays, one on the relationship between art and mechanized civilization, and the second, written in 1931, on the collapse of human values and civilization leading up to the catastrophe of armed conflict. These offer a devastating analysis of the consequences that attend the desertion of liberal principles, indeed of all politics as such, in the ultimate self-annihilation of military conquest.The volume opens with three substantial introductory essays by the editors, authorities in the fields of critical and literary history, social and cultural anthropology, and the philosophy of history and the history of ideas; they provide their explanatory and contextual notes to guide the reader through the texts. The Philosophy of Enchantment brings hitherto unrecognized areas of Collingwood's achievement to light, and demonstrates the broad range of Collingwood's intellectualengagements, their integration, and their relevance to current areas of debate in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, social and literary history, and anthropology.
Download or read book Spells of Enchantment written by Jack David Zipes and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Art of Re enchantment written by Nick Wilson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically informed performance (HIP) has provoked heated debate amongst musicologists, performers and cultural sociologists. In The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age, author Nick Wilson answers many salient questions surrounding HIP through an in-depth analysis of the early music movement in Britain from the 1960s to the present day.
Download or read book The Re Enchantment of the West Vol 2 written by Christopher Partridge and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-06-20 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging some assessments of religion in the West, this study argues that, although much organized religion, particularly Christianity, is in numerical decline, in actual fact we are witnessing an alternative spiritual re-enchantment of society and culture.
Download or read book The Re enchantment of the World written by Joshua Landy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Re Enchantment of the West written by Christopher Partridge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a book about emergent spirituality in the contemporary West, this books focuses on the nature, evolution and significance of new forms of religion and alternative spiritualities. Part One of the book provides the theoretical background and guides the reader through some of the principal debates. After an overview of the secularization thesis, which argues that the West is becoming increasingly disenchanted, the second chapter turns to the sociological analysis of new religions and alternative spiritualities. Particular attention is given to the ideas of the sociologist of religion Ernst Troeltsch, especially his enigmatic analysis of the emergence mystical religion, which presciently provides helpful insights into understanding the contemporary alternative religious milieu. Against sociologists such as Bryan Wilson and Steve Bruce, this and the subsequent chapter argues that, rather than being insignificant, new forms of spirituality are actually proving to be a significant part of Western re-enchantment. Chapter 3 constructs a general theory of the re-enchantment of the West.
Download or read book Enchantment written by Orson Scott Card and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2005-05-31 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Enchantment, Orson Scott Card works his magic as never before, transforming the timeless story of Sleeping Beauty into an original fantasy brimming with romance and adventure. The moment Ivan stumbled upon a clearing in the dense Carpathian forest, his life was forever changed. Atop a pedestal encircled by fallen leaves, the beautiful princess Katerina lay still as death. But beneath the foliage a malevolent presence stirred and sent the ten-year-old Ivan scrambling for the safety of Cousin Marek's farm. Now, years later, Ivan is an American graduate student, engaged to be married. Yet he cannot forget that long-ago day in the forest—or convince himself it was merely a frightened boy’s fantasy. Compelled to return to his native land, Ivan finds the clearing just as he left it. This time he does not run. This time he awakens the beauty with a kiss . . . and steps into a world that vanished a thousand years ago. A rich tapestry of clashing worlds and cultures, Enchantment is a powerfully original novel of a love and destiny that transcend centuries . . . and the dark force that stalks them across the ages.
Download or read book Enchantment and Exploitation written by William DeBuys and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unusual book is a complete account of the closely linked natural and human history of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, a region unique in its rich combination of ecological and cultural diversity.