Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred

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Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred

David L. Martin - Personal Name;

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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Series Title: -
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Publisher: : The MIT Press., 2011
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Language: English
ISBN/ISSN: 9780262298971
Classification: NONE
Content Type: text
Media Type: computer
Carrier Type: online resource
Edition: -
Subject(s): Arts
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Statement of Responsibility: Martin, David L.

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Cataloger: Kholif Basri
Source: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2936/Curious-Visions-of-ModernityEnchantment-Magic-and
Validator: Maya
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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 wi

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