We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak and remain silent. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue offers a far-ranging and probing exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined the power and life of statues, real and metaphoric, taking up examples from antiquity to modernity, from Ovid, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare to Freud, Rilke, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is about the fate of works ...
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We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak and remain silent. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue offers a far-ranging and probing exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined the power and life of statues, real and metaphoric, taking up examples from antiquity to modernity, from Ovid, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare to Freud, Rilke, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is about the fate of works of art and about the fate of our fantasies, words, and bodies, about the metamorphoses they undergo in our own and others' minds.
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I am using this book for my PhD research on objects that come to life in texts by several authors (genres such as the fantastic, science fiction, etc.). I find the ideas interesting, well presented and a pleasure to read. The text is Freudian in outlook so anyone who has difficulties with this theoretical approach may find some of the explanations less palatable. The author discusses a large number of different objects and texts / genres in different periods rather than one specific period or phenomenon, so that the book gives a nice general overview. For me it makes clearer the difference between agency and animation inherent in the object itself (a statue really coming to life), versus the concept that animation is a result of a human's interaction or perception of the object (topics also discussed by S. Todorov in The Fantastic). I would recommend the book to anyone interested in topics of art, animation and human perception.
