Can I read Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism on EtoBox?

Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven Connor is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism about?

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 femal

Who reads Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism?

Author

Steven Connor

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published

2001

Language

EN

ISBN

9780191541841

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Anthropology, Humanities