ENGLISH

Modernism and magic : experiments with spiritualism, theosophy and the occult

By Wilson , Leigh

Book information

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Year
2013
ISBN
0748627693, 978-0-7486-2769-1, 978-0-7486-3165-0, 0748631658, 978-0-7486-7233-2, 978-0-7486-7234-9
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (1759554 bytes)
Series
Edinburgh critical studies in modernist culture
Edition
1
Pages
187\201
Time added
2015-12-23 22:00:00
Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism. SModern.Modernism (Christian theology) Modernism (Literatu

Description

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 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

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