Product Description

Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators to rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1427943 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review
"Modern Enchantments is a magisterial, breathtaking book. Magic is everywhere, During notes, from the simple act of naming to the complicated technologies of the cinema. By connecting performance and religion, he brilliantly shows how older forms of ritual magic find a new and different space in modern culture, reappearing as show business, advertising, and fiction making. This dazzling and stimulating book is sure to rekindle wide interest in spiritualism and magic as makers of modern culture. Modern Enchantments is cultural history at its best." - Gauri Viswanathan, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief"

The Guardian Review 28 September 2002
His history and analysis is certainly thorough and compelling.

About the Author
Simon During holds the Robert Wallace Chair in English at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Foucault and Literature and Patrick White and the editor of The Cultural Studies Reader.

Customer Reviews

Disenchanted
This is by no means a bad book - but it is one likely to disappoint readers interested in the history of magic rather than in critical theory.

During's subject is not magic itself, but what he describes as "the magical assemblage [by which] I mean that motley of shows in the public space where magic was performed". The author goes on to define magic as "a province in the domain of fictionality which fictionalizes by simulating reality rather than truth". The distinction between reality and truth suggests the unique reasoning which enables During to describe anything he wishes to discuss as magic. Cinema - magic. The novel - magic. Fine art - magic. Photography - magic. The bewildered reader is served essays on George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda", Fox Talbot and early photography, The writings of E.T.A Hoffmann and Raymond Roussel, Shaftesbury's views on humour in religion and the history of London's Lyceum - to name a few.

Much of this material is undeniably fascinating and when During does discuss stage magic, the subject alone guarantees interest. There is real pleasure and information here. But... to quote just one example: A 6-page discussion of Spinoza's views on the magic lantern begins "Spinoza never refers to the magic lantern", then after three sentences cheerfully asserts that "to Spinoza the magic lantern was a threat to his philosophy" and proceeds accordingly. "Modern Enchantments" bursts with similar straw men, and the reason for their presence, as far as I can see, is simply to allow the author to write about what interests him, because magic clearly does not. To me, the book often seemed focussed on rhetoric not content.

Perhaps this explains why the text often lapses into a near-parody of "academic" American. Typically, when the author suggests that the history of a theatre illuminates changing tastes and attitudes, he writes "mapping diachronic changes within a genre of place allows historians to catch history close to the ground, and to write microhistories of the magic assemblage stabilized by material continuity. By positing such topographical genres we also gain access to an occluded logic of cultural equivalence". I wonder if he sometimes even understands himself: I cannot begin to imagine what a sentence like "magic is split not simply between aura and nullity" means.

In short, Modern Enchantments is a book to plug shelves in university libraries and possibly a gap in Prof. During's CV - but serious students of magical history probably need not need trouble their wallets.