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Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate - all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of 'aesthetic illusion', as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic illusion is one of the most forceful effects of reception processes in representational media and thus constitutes a powerful allurement to expose ourselves, again and again to, e.g., printed stories, pictures and films, be they factual or fictional.

The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights. The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern.

Among the multiple approaches to be taken on an author as multifaceted and prolific as the recent Nobel Laureate Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Guadalupe Martí-Peña has chosen to look at the novelist as an illusionist. She studies this land of fantasies and daydreams, that seemingly harmless battlefield where literature, theater, and painting contend and join together with the writer, the dreamer, and the illusionist to oust reality. Focusing on Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and the effect of illusion on the reading process, she argues that by referring to theatrical, pictorial, and mystical patterns Vargas Llosa entices us to experience, along with his characters, the unreal as real, the dream as reality, the magic of fiction as an empowering act. The book looks first at the theatricality and theatrics that enliven both texts. In the light of reader/spectator-response theories and theater semiotics, Martí-Peña shows how the novelist turns narrating into acting, fiction into performance, and reading into seeing. She next reflects upon the role that painting plays in the materialization of the characters’ desires and illusions. By funneling pictorial aesthetics through the prism of narration, and by engaging with theory concerned with issues of text-image interrelations, she examines the various functions paintings play within the linguistic system. Finally, she compares Rigoberto’s writing exercises to the writings of self-examination described by Michel Foucault in “L’écriture de soi.” Both texts encapsulate the main active ingredient in all of Vargas Llosa’s writings: that fiction is not a submission to life, but rather an insurrection against it. Verbal illusionism becomes the most efficient tactic to carry out such a rebellion. The text of this book is in spa.

Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate - all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of 'aesthetic illusion', as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic illusion is one of the most forceful effects of reception processes in representational media and thus constitutes a powerful allurement to expose ourselves, again and again to, e.g., printed stories, pictures and films, be they factual or fictional. In contrast to traditional discussions of this phenomenon, which tend to focus on one medium or genre from one discipline only, the present volume explores aesthetic illusion, as well as its reverse side, the breaking of illusion, from a highly innovative multidisciplinary and transmedial perspective. The essays assembled stem from disciplines that range from literary theory to art history and include contributions on drama, lyric poetry, the visual arts, photography, architecture, instrumental music and computer games, as well as reflections on the cognitive foundations of aesthetic illusion from an evolutionary perspective. The contributions to individual media and aspects of aesthetic illusion are prefaced by a detailed theoretical introduction. Owing to its transmedial and multidisciplinary scope, the volume will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies, as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film, and art history.

Entre los mltiples modos de acercarse a un autor tan polifactico y prolfico como el escritor peruano Mario Vargas Llosa, quien gan el premio Nobel de 2010, Guadalupe Mart-Pea ha elegido ver al novelista como ilusionista. Estudia ese mundo de fantasas y ensueos, ese campo de guerra aparentemente inofensivo donde la literatura, el teatro, y la pintura se alan con el escritor, el soador, y el ilusionista para derrocar la realidad. Centrndose en Elogio de la madrastra y Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, as como el efecto de la ilusin en el proceso de la lectura, arguye que Vargas Llosa hace uso de patrones teatrales, pictricos y msticos para hacernos experimentar lo irreal como real, el sueo como realidad y la magia de la ficcin como un acto que nos otorga poder. Con base a los estudios interartsticos, la semitica y las teoras de la recepcin, analiza cmo estos textos producen en los lectores la triple ilusin de presenciar una obra dramtica, contemplar un cuadro o entreor una convers (ac)in mstica. El primer capitulo del libro se concentra en la teatralidad que anima ambos textos. Partiendo de las teoras sobre la recepcin y la semitica teatral, Mart-Pea investiga el modo en que el autor transforma la narracin en actuacin, la ficcin en performance, y el leer en ver, haciendo que los lectores experimenten la palabra escrita como una representacin viva ante sus ojos. En el segundo reflexiona sobre la funcin que desempea la pintura en la materializacin de los deseos e ilusiones de los personajes. Combinando esttica pictrica y narracin, y bajo el lente de las teoras sobre la relacin imagen-texto, examina las distintas funciones que desempean los cuadros dentro del sistema lingu.stico donde operan. En el ltimo captulo, compara los escritos de Rigoberto con la escritura de autoexamen que Michel Foucault describe en Lcriture de soi. Mientras que el asceta trata de transformar su vida en una obra de perfeccin moral alejando de l las ilusiones, Rigoberto trata de transformar su existencia en una obra de arte congregando fantasas erticas. Ambos textos encapsulan el principal ingrediente activo en la escritura de Vargas Llosa: la ficcin no es sumisin ante la vida sino por el contrario insurreccin contra ella. El ilusionismo verbal se convierte en la tctica ms eficaz para llevar a cabo tal rebelión. Among the multiple approaches to be taken on an author as multifaceted and prolific as the recent Nobel Laureate Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Guadalupe Martí-Peña has chosen to look at the novelist as an illusionist. She studies this land of fantasies and daydreams, that seemingly harmless battlefield where literature, theater, and painting contend and join together with the writer, the dreamer, and the illusionist to oust reality. Focusing on Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and the effect of illusion on the reading process, she argues that by referring to theatrical, pictorial, and mystical patterns Vargas Llosa entices us to experience, along with his characters, the unreal as real, the dream as reality, the magic of fiction as an empowering act.The book looks first at the theatricality and theatrics that enliven both texts. In the light of reader/spectator-response theories and theater semiotics, Martí-Peña shows how the novelist turns narrating into acting, fiction into performance, and reading into seeing. She next reflects upon the role that painting plays in the materialization of the characters' desires and illusions. By funneling pictorial aesthetics through the prism of narration, and by engaging with theory concerned with issues of text-image interrelations, she examines the various functions paintings play within the linguistic system. Finally, she compares Rigoberto's writing exercises to the writings of self-examination described by Michel Foucault in \"L'écriture de soi.\" Both texts encapsulate the main active ingredient in all of Vargas Llosa's writings: that fiction is not a submission to life, but rather an insurrection against it. Verbal illusionism becomes the most efficient tactic to carry out such a rebellion.The text of this book is in Spanish.

  The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights. The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured. What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the protection of their illusions? The author develops a three-part historical analysis of the use of the reality-illusion theme, from its origins as a metaphysical search to its current elaborations as a theatrical game.  

No detailed description available for \"Reflecting Senses\".

In this original and fascinating book, Stuart Clark investigates the cultural history of the senses in early modern Europe. At a time in which the nature and reliability of human vision was a focus for debate in medicine, art theory, science, and philosophy, there was an explosion of interest in the truth (or otherwise) of miracles, dreams, magic, and witchcraft. Was seeing really believing? Vanities of the Eye wonderfully illustrates how this was woven into contemporary. works such as Macbeth - deeply concerned with the dangers of visual illusion - and exposes early modern theories on the relationship between the real and the virtual. - ;Vanities of the Eye investigates the cultural history of the senses in early modern Europe, a time in which the nature and reliability of human vision was the focus of much debate. In medicine, art theory, science, religion, and philosophy, sight came to be characterised as uncertain or paradoxical - mental images no longer resembled the external world. Was seeing really believing?. Stuart Clark explores the controversial debates of the time - from the fantasies and hallucinations of melancholia, to the illusions of magic, art, demonic deceptions, and witchcraft. The truth and function of religious images and the authenticity of miracles and visions were also questioned with new vigour, affecting such contemporary works as Macbeth - a play deeply concerned with the dangers of visual illusion. Clark also contends that there was a close connection between these. debates and the ways in which philosophers such as Descartes and Hobbes developed new theories on the relationship between the real and virtual. Original, highly accessible, and a major contribution to our understanding of European culture, Vanities of the Eye will be of great interest to a wide range of historians and anyone interested in the true nature of seeing. - ;...compelling...Vanities of the Eye offers readers a taste of the unexpected and fruitful complexities to be gained by turning a serious eye to the historical questions of sight. - Yvonne Gasper Institute for Historical Review;A densely argued but wonderfully subtle exploration of how, from the 15th to the 17th centuries, people developed a complex understanding of the relationship between what was seen and what was known. - PD Smith, The Guardian;Vanities of the Eye is dense with examples of the interpenetration of the weird, the wondrous and the mundane, drawn from a deep well of scholarship... A thoroughly satisfying read... 9 out of 10 - Fortean Times.

Disguise is a recurring figure in many Renaissance texts. In its apparent intention to deceive, it raises complex issues of identity, motivation, and the construction of character. Lloyd Davis's Guise and Disguise examines disguise as a rhetorical and dramatistic motif in a wide range of Renaissance texts. Drawing on the sociological analyses of character in the work of Goffmann and Garfinkel as well as on recent historicist studies of Renaissance literature, Davis argues against an essentialist notion of identity. He posits a counter-tradition of character as invented, shaped guise, a cultural process realized through rhetorical and dramatic performance. Davis traces the conflict between idealist and cultural notions of selfhood fromits classical roots to its role as a key social concern in the English Renaissance. He analyses rhetorical texts from Wilson, Rainolds, Puttenham, and Sidney; the political and social philosophies of Machiavelli, Castiglione, Montaigne, Bacon, and Hobbes; the religious writings of Erasmus, Calvin, and Donne; and the dramatic works of Lyly, Shakespeare, Marston, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher. He sees issues of selfhood and identity as central to the period's ideological and gender discourses, and strategies of disguise and character-making as challenging the political and sexual motives that underlie imags of the essentialist self. Davis's approach links Renaissance culture both to its past and to modern and post-modern notions of subjectivity and language.

I've been thinking about how my body inhabits place and how it changes - fluctuating between comfort and pain - depending on the state of my illness. While reading Chris Kraus in bed, I'm caught by an obscure reference to a study where people who are not experiencing mental illness are admitted to psychiatric institutions. The idea feels like a transformation I need to seek out, one that unpicks the very conception of mental illness. Could this study answer questions that have been bubbling beneath my skin for months? I spend half an hour searching for it, my body filled with an odd urgency until it is before me: 'On Being Sane in Insane Places', published in 1973. The first line reads: 'If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?' It's a surprise, finding this kind of language in an academic study: I've spent years reading medical journals in search of answers about my own obscure diagnosis, so I'm used to both absolutes and qualifications. But I'm still left with questions: how does place influence our minds? And if sanity and insanity do exist, how can we be sane in an insane place?