The secret life of puppets / Victoria Nelson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nelson, Victoria.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science fiction--History and criticism.

Science fiction.

Science fiction--Religious aspects.

Puppets in literature.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xi, 350 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2001.

Summary:

In one of those rare books that allow us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing. Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science.

In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, and Musil to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. Two touchstones of this analysis are the polish Jewish fantasist Bruno Schulz and the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

Contents:

1 Grotto, An Opening 1

2 Early Adventures of the Earthly Gods 25

3 The Puppet Tractates 47

4 The Strange History of the American Fantastic 75

5 H. P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies 101

6 Symmes Hole, or the South Polar Grotto 139

7 Is This Real or Am I Crazy? 163

8 Two Old Birds and Their New Feathers 189

9 The New Expressionists 213

10 The Hermeticon of Umbertus E. 235

11 The Great Twentieth-Century Puppet Upgrade 249

12 The Door in the Sky 273.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [293]-335) and index.

ISBN:

0674006305

OCLC:

47073083