Curious visions of modernity : enchantment, magic, and the sacred /
Author / Creator: | Martin, David L., 1971- |
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Imprint: | Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2011. |
Description: | 1 online resource (xviii, 255 pages) : illustrations |
Language: | English |
Subject: | |
Format: | E-Resource Book |
URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11121600 |
Summary: | Haunted by a secret knowledge and a repressed enchantment, Western rationality is not what it seems. Rembrandt's famous painting of an anatomy lesson, the shrunken head of an Australian indigenous leader, an aerial view of Paris from a balloon: all are windows to enchantment, curiosities that illuminate something shadowy and forgotten lurking behind the neat facade of a rational world. In Curious Visions of Modernity, David Martin unpacks a collection of artifacts from the visual and historical archives of modernity, finding in each a slippage of scientific rationality--a repressed heterogeneity within the homogenized structures of post-Enlightenment knowledge. In doing so, he exposes modernity and its visual culture as haunted by precisely those things that rationality sought to expunge from the "enlightened" world: enchantment, magic, and wonderment. Martin traces the genealogies of what he considers three of the most distinct and historically immediate fields of modern visual culture: the collection, the body, and the mapping of spaces. In a narrative resembling the many-drawered curiosity cabinets of the Renaissance rather than the locked glass cases of the modern museum, he shows us a world renewed through the act of collecting the wondrous and aberrant objects of Creation; tortured and broken flesh rising from the dissecting tables of anatomy theaters to stalk the discourses of medical knowledge; and the spilling forth of a pictorializing geometry from the gilt frames of Renaissance panel paintings to venerate a panoptic god. Accounting for the visual disenchantment of modernity, Martin offers a curious vision of its reenchantment. |
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Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xviii, 255 pages) : illustrations |
Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-248) and index. |
ISBN: | 9780262298971 026229897X 9780262298100 0262298104 9780262016063 0262016060 1283343703 9781283343701 |