Modern Enchantments The Cultural Poer Of Secular Magic [Paperback]

Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts--and by magic, During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows--affect people?

Modern Enchantmentstakes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still,Modern Enchantmentsshows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.

Simon Durings book shows deep, wide reading in an awe-inspiring range of disciplines, including urban history, German Romantic philosophy, and modern cultural critiques of consumption&Modern Enchantmentsis a richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.A well-researched and finely paced history of performance magic&Durings history and analysis is certainly thorough and compelling.The first major academic work on secular magicmagic that makes no claim to the supernatural. TlC#