Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
Steven Connor
Price: £46.00 (Hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-818433-1
Publication date: 26 October 2000
458 pages, 8 pp halftone plates, 234x156 mm
A sample of this book is available in PDF format
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| Reviews |
| - 'erudite and broad in scope. Its strength is the way it links cultural phenomena in new ways ... Connor gives us an intelligent study of a domain of skilful cultural creativity, against a background of several millennia of appalling irrational behaviour.' - Raphael Salkie, Times Higher Education Supplement
- 'fascinating ... highly recommended, not least for its sheer breadth of scholarship.' - Brian Boyd, Irish Times (Dublin) 13.01.01.
- 'this incredibly erudite work ... is easily the best account of the dark business at the roots of the art ... a scholarly but wry style that is a pleasure to read.' - Andrew Martin, New Statesman
- 'comprehensive history ... peppered with shrewd observations.' - The New York Times Book Review
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| Description | | - A work of theoretical ambition and great historical range
- New and surprising material wedded to general arguments of wide relevance
| | 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. |
Readership: Cultural historians, especially those with an interest in auditory culture, an area growing in interest in reaction to the domination of visual culture. Historians and theorists of gender. Those interested in postmodernism, postmodern theory and contemporary cultures of technology. Psychoanalytic theorists. People with an amateur interest in ventriloquism.
| Contents |
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
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London
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