Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-0-19-818433-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 458 Seiten, Format (B × H): 165 mm x 242 mm, Gewicht: 865 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Connor, Steven

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Tanz Andere Darstellende Künste

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Part I: Powers

- 1: What I Say Goes

- Part II: Prophecies

- 2: Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle

- 3: Origen, Eustathius, and The Witch of Endor

- Part III: Possessions

- 4: Hoc Est Corpus

- 5: The Exorcism of John Darrell

- 6: O, that Oh is the Devill: Glover and Harsnett

- Part IV: Prodigies

- 7: Miracles and the Encyclopédie

- 8: Speaking Parts: Diderot and Les Bijoux indiscrets

- 9: The Abbé and the Ventriloque

- 10: The Dictate of Phrenzy: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland

- Part V: Polyphonics

- 11: Ubiquitarical

- 12: At Home and Abroad: Monsieur Alexandre and Mr Matthews

- 13: Phenomena in the Philosophy of Sound: Mr Love

- 14: Writing the Voice

- Part VI: Prosthetics

- 15: Vocal Reinforcement

- 16: Talking Heads, Automaton Ears

- 17: A Gramophone in Every Grave

- Part VII: No Time Like the Present

- 18: No Time Like the Present

- Works Cited

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Steven Connor was educated at Christ's Hospital, Horsham and Wadham College, Oxford, and has taught at Birkbeck College, University of London since 1979, where he is currently Professor of Modern Literature and Theory.