Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity

Most cultural critics theorize modernity as a state of disenchanted distraction, one linked to both the rationalizing...
$135.90 AUD
$135.90 AUD
SKU: 9780807178515
Product Type: Books
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Author: Patrick Kindig
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $135.90
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Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity by Kindig, Patrick

Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity

$135.90

Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity

$135.90
Author: Patrick Kindig
Format: Hardcover
Language: English

Most cultural critics theorize modernity as a state of disenchanted distraction, one linked to both the rationalizing impulses of scientific and technological innovation and the kind of dispersed, fragmented attention that characterizes the experience of mass culture. Patrick Kindig's Fascination, however, tells a different story, showing that many fin-de-siècle Americans were in fact concerned about (and intrigued by) the modern world's ability to attract and fix attention in quasi-supernatural ways. Rather than being distracting, modern life in their view had an almost magical capacity to capture attention and overwhelm rational thought.

Fascination argues that, in response to the dramatic scientific and cultural changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American thinkers and writers came to conceive of the modern world as fundamentally fascinating. Describing such diverse phenomena as the electric generator, the movements of actresses, and ethnographic cinema as supernaturally alluring, they used the language of fascination to process and critique both popular ideologies of historical progress and the racializing logic upon which these ideologies were built.

Drawing on an archive of primary texts from the fields of medicine, (para)psychology, philosophy, cultural criticism, and anthropology--as well as creative texts by Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward S. Curtis, Robert J. Flaherty, and Djuna Barnes--Kindig reconsiders what it meant for Americans to be (and to be called) modern at the turn of the twentieth century.

Author: Patrick Kindig
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 12/14/2022
Pages: 228
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.96lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780807178515

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