Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

by Connor, Steven

• ISBN13: 9780198184331
• ISBN10: 0198184336
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Ventriloquism, the art of "seeming to speak where one is not", speaks so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition. We now think nothing of hearing voices--our own and others'--propelled over intercoms, cellphones, and answering machines. Yet, why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? And why does the magician's trick of speaking through a dummy entertain as well as disturb us? These are the kind of questions which impel Dumbstruck , Steven Connor's wide-ranging, relentlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. Connor follows his subject from its early beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the outcries of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination. Surprisingly, he finds that women like the sibyls of Delphi were the key voices in these male-dominated times. Connor then turns to the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange cultural obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, that flourished during the Enlightenment. He retells the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like the telephone, radio, film, and the internet. Brimming with anecdote and insight, Dumbstruck is a provocative archeology of a seemingly trivial yet profoundly relevant presence in human history. Its pages overflow with virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.

Author Biography

Stephen Connor was educated at Christ's Hospital Horsham and Wadham College, Oxford, and has taught at Birkbeck College, University of London since 1979. He currently is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory. He is the author of numerous books on English literature and cultural studies, including Charles Dickens, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, and Theory and Cultural Value.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Part I Powers	1	(44)
What I Say Goes	3	(42)
Part II Prophecies	45	(58)
Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle	47	(28)
Origen, Eustathius, and the Witch of Endor	75	(28)
Part III Possessions	103	(74)
Hoc Est Corpus	105	(26)
The Exorcism of John Darrell	131	(22)
O, that `Oh' is the Devill: Glover and Harsnett	153	(24)
Part IV Prodigies	177	(70)
Miracles and Mutilations	179	(12)
Speaking Parts: Diderot and Les Bijoux indiscrets	191	(18)
The Abbe and the Ventriloque	209	(17)
The Dictate of Phrenzy: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland	226	(21)
Part V Polyphonics	247	(78)
Ubiquitarical	249	(16)
At Home and Abroad: Monsieur Alexandre and Mr Mathews	265	(25)
Phenomena in the Philosophy of Sound: Mr Love	290	(16)
Writing the Voice	306	(19)
Part VI Prosthetics	325	(70)
Vocal Reinforcement	327	(11)
Talking Heads, Automaton Ears	338	(24)
A Gramophone in Every Grave	362	(33)
Part VII No Time Like the Present	395	(23)
No Time Like the Present	397	(21)
Bibliography	418	(19)
Index	437