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Modernism and magic : experiments with spiritualism, theosophy and the occult PDF

201 Pages·2013·1.678 MB·English
by  WilsonLeigh
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edinburgh critical studies in modernist culture MODERNISM AND MAGIC experiments with spiritualism, theosophy and the occult LEIGH WILSON MODERNISM AND MAGIC WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd ii 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 E dinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture Series Editors: Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley Forthcoming Series Volumes: Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, Leigh Wilson Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts, Sam Halliday Modernism and the Frankfurt School, Tyrus Miller Late Modernism, Laura Salisbury Modernism, Space and the City, Andrew Thacker Modernism and the Idea of Everyday Life, Leena Kore-Schroder WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iiii 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 MODERNISM AND MAGIC Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult Leigh Wilson WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iiiiii 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 For my parents, with love, and in loving memory of Helen Litt © Leigh Wilson, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2769 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3165 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7233 2 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 7234 9 (Amazon ebook) The right of Leigh Wilson to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iivv 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 CONTENTS Series Editors’ Preface vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise 22 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts 44 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation 75 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film 103 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation 135 Bibliography 168 Index 184 WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vv 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to refl ect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest (the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also re-consider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender; sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cul- tural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European modernisms, and to inter-disciplinary possibilities within modernism, includ- ing performance and the visual and plastic arts. vi WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vvii 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely grateful to Becky Beasely and Tim Armstrong for giving me the opportunity to write this book, for their patient support during its writing, and for their useful comments and suggestions. The book would have taken even longer to complete without the generous funding of research leave by the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. I am very grateful for this, and more generally for the friend- ship and support provided by members of the department. In particular, my thanks go to Alex Warwick for her long and most valued friendship. Alex, David Cunningham, Michael Nath and Anne Witchard all read portions of this book, and gave generous comments and advice. Along with them, I would like to thank other colleagues in the department and elsewhere for friendship and support during the long gestation of the ideas that make up the book, in particular Simon Avery, Monica Germanà, Mary Grover, Tatiana Kontou, Roger Luckhurst, Sas Mays, Kaye Mitchell, Laura Salisbury, Justin Sausman, Marquard Smith, Louise Sylvester, Andrew Teverson, Pam Thurschwell. Thanks too to all at Edinburgh University Press, especially Jenny Daly, James Dale and Rebecca Mackenzie. Thanks also to my family and friends outside the academy for their sterling attempts at being interested (‘What, you’re still working on the same book?’). Special thanks go to my parents, Bob and Averil Wilson, for their love and support; and thanks and much love to Toby Litt, Henry Wilson-Litt and George Wilson-Litt, who are magic. Figure 5.1 from Sergei M. Eisenstein (1986), Eisenstein on Disney, edited by Jay Leyda, translated by Alan Upchurch, introduced by Naum Kleiman, is reproduced with kind permission of Seagull Press. Extracts from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and Faber and Faber Ltd. Extract from ‘Spring and All’ by William Carlos Williams from Imaginations vii WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vviiii 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 MODERNISM AND MAGIC (1970), edited and with an introduction by Webster Schott, is reprinted by kind permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. (USA and Cananda) and Carcanet Press (UK and Commonwealth). viii WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vviiiiii 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377 INTRODUCTION This book argues that the aesthetic experiments of the fi rst half of the twenti- eth century that we call modernism drew on the discourses of the occult domi- nant during the period – in particular on spiritualism and theosophy – because in them it saw the possibilities for a reconceptualisation of the mimetic. While these discourses have been much investigated in critical works of the last few decades, what neither recent scholars nor many practitioners, or indeed critics, at the time have admitted is the extent to which they have magic at their heart. Yet these occult discourses provided possibilities for experiment for writers, fi lmmakers and artists because in them resided a productive magic; productive because it was a magic that fundamentally understood that the mimetic is able to produce, not just an inert copy, but an animated copy powerful enough to enact change in the original. That the period encompassing the end of the nineteenth century and the begin- ning of the twentieth century experienced an occult revival is now well estab- lished. There have been numerous cultural histories of this over the last thirty years or so, establishing occult beliefs, magical thinking or belief in the survival of the individual beyond death as central to the construction of modernity during this time (Oppenheim 1985; Owen 1989; Thurschwell 2001; Luckhurst 2002; Owen 2004; Warner 2006). Rather than embarrassing aberrations, in these works such beliefs are claimed as central to the production of what was considered modern. These cultural histories have been accompanied by works attempting to establish the importance of these discourses for m odernist artistic 1 WWIILLSSOONN MMAAGGIICC 99778800774488662277669911 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd 11 2233//1100//22001122 1144::3377

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