The Secret Life of PuppetsIn one of those rare books that allows 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, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. 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
PREFACE | |
1 GROTTO AN OPENING | |
2 EARLY ADVENTURES OF THE EARTHLY GODS | |
3 THE PUPPET TRACTATES | |
4 THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FANTASTIC | |
5 HP LOVECRAFT AND THE GREAT HERESIES | |
6 SYMMES HOLE OR THE SOUTH POLAR GROTTO | |
7 IS THIS REAL OR AM I CRAZY? | |
8 TWO OLD BIRDS AND THEIR NEW FEATHERS | |
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ªction aesthetic ªgure ªlm American ancient animated ªrst become believe body Bruno called Chapter character Christian completely consciousness cosmos created cults culture dark death demonic described directed divine dream early Earth example experience Expressionist fact fantastic follow genre gods Greek grotto human idea images imagination inner John journey kind language Late literary literature living look Lovecraft machine magic material matter means memory mind moved mystic narrative natural Neoplatonic noted notion novel object once original person philosophical physical Platonic Pole popular possessed powers present projection psyche puppet quoted readers reality realm religion religious Renaissance represented Romantic says Schreber Schulz secular sense soul spirit statues story structure supernatural things tion tradition trans transformation true turn twentieth century University Press virtual Western writers y E x York