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Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Cinema and Modernity Series) by Stefan Andriopoulos is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Cinema and Modernity Series) about?

Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. Stefan Andriopoulos shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing this preoccupation through the period's films—as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts—Andriopoulos pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one's will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, Andriopoulos also develops an innovative reading of Kafka's novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies. Blending theo

Author

Stefan Andriopoulos

Publisher

University Of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press

Published

2008

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226020570

Subjects

Literary Criticism, True Crime, Performing Arts