Spiritualism and Enchantment Flashcards
Saler, crisis of religion
Many at the turn of the century mourned the apparent absence of communal beliefs and higher ideals in an age that seemed dominated by positivism and materialism, and turned to alternative sources of spiritual sustenance.
psychical research and spiritualism, both nineteenth-century efforts at finding a via media between science and religion
Saler, enchantment
Holmes demonstrated how the modern world could be re-enchanted through means entirely consistent with modernity
utilized reason in a manner magical and adventurous ‘the scientific use of the imagination’
‘animistic reason’ because it imbues its objects with meaning. It was through his animistic reason that Holmes the private detective bested professional detectives on cases
Saler, enchantment
Holmes demonstrated how the modern world could be re-enchanted through means entirely consistent with modernity
utilized reason in a manner magical and adventurous ‘the scientific use of the imagination’
‘animistic reason’ because it imbues its objects with meaning. It was through his animistic reason that Holmes the private detective bested professional detectives on cases
increasing popularity of detective fiction in the wake of Holmes. It was aided by the establishment of ‘ science fiction’ as a defined literary genre in 1926, when Hugo Gernsback published Amazing Stories in America, the first magazine devoted entirely to what he initially termed ‘ scientifiction’.
one could actively believe, albeit ironically, in fictions (ironic imagination)
With this, as well as the extension of leisure and the spectacularization of culture in the forms of mass literature, films, and radio, individuals were both encouraged and enabled to play without relinquishing their grip on reality
This rational and ironic stance distinguishes modern enchantment from earlier forms of enchantment: the distinction between Conan Doyle’s premodern belief in preternatural fairies, and his readers’ modern, ironic belief in the fictional Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle + Holmes were confused in public imagination. When Holmes received obituary notices in 1893, many thought that Doyle had died
The aspect of Holmes that made him into a modern icon for all those who professed belief in him, to whatever degree, was that he re-enchanted modernity without compromising the central tenets of modernity: rationalism, secularism, urbanism, mass consumerism.
helped to legitimate the idea that Western adults could indulge their imaginations without losing their reason
By the early twentieth century there was an increasing recognition by artists and intellectuals of the constitutive role of the imagination in perceptions of reality: a new, ‘aestheticist’ episemology that gave adults greater latitude to indulge their imaginations than had been the case in the early to mid-nineteenth century
autonomous worlds of the imagination created by both modernist and popular writers during the fin-de-sie`cle were indebted to the genesis of children’s literature as a genre beginning in the 1860s – the new genre itself marking the decline of earlier Victorian evangelical and utilitarian strictures against the indulgence of the imagination
By the end of the century such virtual realities of the imagination had become substantially augmented by information technologies
The ironic imagination has thus become ubiquitous, re-enchanting a secular, rational, and commodified world without rejecting these central components of modernity
Cultural pessimists of the fin-de-sie`cle promoted a concept of instrumental rationality that distinguished reason and the imagination, rendering modernity as disenchanted. But at the same moment a countervailing trend
