Modernism and Magic : : Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult / / Leigh Wilson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Wilson, Leigh,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture : ECCSMC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

Explores the interplay between modernist experiment and occult discourses in the early twentieth centuryThis study presents a new account of the relation between modernism and occult discourses. 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 an attempt to draw on 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1 ‘BUT THE FACTS OF LIFE PERSIST’: MAGIC, EXPERIMENT AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTING THE WORLD OTHERWISE -- 2 ‘AND WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH EXPERIMENTAL WRITING?’: WORDS AND GHOSTS -- 3 A ‘SUBTLE METAMORPHOSIS’: SOUND, MIMESIS AND TRANSFORMATION -- 4 ‘HERE IS WHERE THE MAGIC IS’: TELEPATHY AND EXPERIMENT IN FILM -- 5 ‘DISNEY AGAINST THE METAPHYSICALS’: EISENSTEIN, POUND, ECTOPLASM AND THE POLITICS OF ANIMATION -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX