Peter Otto
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199567676
- eISBN:
- 9780191725364
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567676.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the ...
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Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.Less
Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.
Jonathan Strauss
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233793
- eISBN:
- 9780823241262
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233793.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
In an attempt to formulate these aesthetic insights in more conceptual terms this chapter turns to the psychoanalytic theories of anality and the fantasm. Fantasms are characterized by a concern ...
More
In an attempt to formulate these aesthetic insights in more conceptual terms this chapter turns to the psychoanalytic theories of anality and the fantasm. Fantasms are characterized by a concern about origins, not merely of the individual but also of the city itself, especially insofar as it is imagined to be a space of reason and meaning. To trace the fantasmatic “history” of Paris, then, this chapter considers key definitions of the city as a rational space. From these myths of enlightenment there emerges an imaginary division between a viscous, sentient materiality of the dead and a pure, abstract sublimity of death. The modern city, in these myths, would be constructed on the basis of the latter in order to protect it against the former.Less
In an attempt to formulate these aesthetic insights in more conceptual terms this chapter turns to the psychoanalytic theories of anality and the fantasm. Fantasms are characterized by a concern about origins, not merely of the individual but also of the city itself, especially insofar as it is imagined to be a space of reason and meaning. To trace the fantasmatic “history” of Paris, then, this chapter considers key definitions of the city as a rational space. From these myths of enlightenment there emerges an imaginary division between a viscous, sentient materiality of the dead and a pure, abstract sublimity of death. The modern city, in these myths, would be constructed on the basis of the latter in order to protect it against the former.
