Description
Book SynopsisIn its exploration of puppetry and animation as the performative media of choice for mastering the art of illusion, To Embody the Marvelous engages with early modern notions of wonder in religious, artistic, and social contexts. From jointed, wood-carved figures of Christ, saintly marionettes that performed hagiographical dramas, experimental puppets and automata in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the mechanical sets around which playwright CalderÓn de la Barca devised secular magic shows to deconstruct superstitions, these historical and fictional artifacts reenvisioned religious, artistic, and social notions that led early modern society to critically wrestle with enchantment and disenchantment. The use of animated performance objects in Spanish theatrical contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most effective pedagogical means to engage with civil society. Regardless of social strata, readers and spectators alike were caught up in a paradigm shift
Trade ReviewThere is an extraordinary interdisciplinarity within the work. The complexity of the detail of technical, philosophical, and metaphorical aspects described is very strong. . . . I have never read anything quite like this before." - Cariad Astles, coeditor of
Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical InvestigationsTable of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Stages of Animation
- Chapter 1 Mechanics of Reductionism
- Socio-political Ticking
- Pious Technologies
- The Lives of Shadows
- Chapter 2 Matters of God
- Beyond the Altar
- Towards the Holy Puppet
- Handling the Descent
- The Jointed Christ Figure Reimagined
- Chapter 3 Articulating Saintliness
- Wooden Saints
- The Archeology of the MÁquina Real
- Modern Object-Centric Sainthood
- Chapter 4 Unruly Puppets
- The Estrangement of Illusions
- Operatizing the Puppet
- Disarticulated Remediations
- Chapter 5 Technologies of Wonder
- Making Wonderlands
- Enchantment Interrupted
- Modern Re-enchantments
- Chapter 6 Trapdoors to DesengaÑo
- Barely Humans
- Animated Thresholds
- Spatial Prosthetics
- Secret Passageways Refurbished
- Conclusion
- When Statues Move
- Work cited
- Index
