Books about Phantasms from Amazon.com

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What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself.

Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined-and are still defining-the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into "ethnically marked" aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the "brain of the earth's body."

Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the "secular theologisms" of the globalized imperial capital called modernity.

Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history, museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms-and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production.

Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and research associate in art history and visual culture at Oxford University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Art of Art History (1998)..
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The late medieval masterpiece Celestina has long been the focus of controversy, over both its authorship and the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies within its plot. Scholars trace the publication of Celestina to 1499, when Fernando de Rojas supposedly discovered the first act and completed the remainder of the drama within a two-week period. The plot centers on the ill-fated love of Calisto and Melibea and the fascinating character of the old bawd, Celestina. Scholars disagree about how to interpret the meeting of the two lovers in the first scene, when they share an unusual conversation that is incongruous with their comportment in the remainder of the work. Ricardo Castells seeks to resolve this and other seeming contradictions by tracing the oneiric, phantasmal, and melancholic traditions of the Renaissance and their effect on the composition of Celestina. Castells explores the European cultural and literary tradition-works of both fiction and nonfiction that would have been available to Rojas-to discover theoretical approaches to the physiology of lovesickness and its accompanying dreams and visions. He employs the themes of love, medicine, and dreams in these works to explain the seemingly illogical progression of the play's action and the ultimately detrimental effects of melancholy, lovesickness, and sensual contamination on the protagonist, Calisto. In so doing, Castells places Celestina within its appropriate cultural and historical context, enriching our perception not only of the text itself but also of the traditions that helped to produce it..
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The first short story collection from Philip K. Dick Award-winning author James Blaylock features sixteen thought-provoking forays into the fantastic-from a tale of alien influence on an ordinary neighborhood to the story of one man's self-destructive obsession with a dragon..
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