Ventriloquism, the art of "seeming to speak where one is not", speaks so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition. We now think nothing of hearing voices--our own and others'--propelled over intercoms, cellphones, and answering machines. Yet, why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? And why does the magician's trick of speaking through a dummy entertain as well as disturb us? These are the kind of questions which impel Dumbstruck, Steven Connor's wide-ranging, relentlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. Connor follows his subject from its early beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the outcries of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination. Surprisingly, he finds that women like the sibyls of Delphi were the key voices in these male-dominated times. Connor then turns to the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange cultural obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, that flourished during the Enlightenment. He retells the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like the telephone, radio, film, and the internet. Brimming with anecdote and insight, Dumbstruck is a provocative archeology of a seemingly trivial yet profoundly relevant presence in human history. Its pages overflow with virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

Humor & Entertainment

Connor, Steven

Puzzles & Games

Oxford University Press

This text gathers together interpretations of Beckett's best-known plays, illustrating a range of theoretical approaches from deconstruction to reader-response theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Included, as well, is an introduction by Steven Connor, assessing the mutual relations between Beckett's work and contemporary literary theory. There are also introductory notes to the essays. The essays are contibuted by: Mary Bryden, James Calderwood, Steven Connor, Jane Hale, Sylvie Henning, Wolfgang Iser, Andrew Kennedy, Paul Lawley, Jeffrey Nealon, Judith Roof, and Gabriele Schwab. Steven Connor has written books on Dickens, Beckett and Postmodernist Culture.

Samuel Beckett: "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame" (New Casebooks)

Literature & Fiction

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Waiting for Godot and Endgame (New Casebooks, 109)

British & Irish

Red Globe Press

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as  * George Orwell  * William Golding  * Angela Carter  * Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo  * Hanif Kureishi  * Marina Warner  * Maggie Gee Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.

The English Novel In History: 1950-1995

Connor, Professor Steven

Routledge

Introduces an array of characters, from the sinister to the comic, and moves to a haunting climax in an atmospheric murder mystery that features the seemingly benevolent John Jasper, a secret opium addict, and his relationship with his newly engaged nephew, Edwin Drood.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Everyman's Library)

DICKENS., CHARLES

Literary

Everymans Library

Charles Dickens (Longman Critical Readers)

Dickens is second only to Shakespeare in the range and intensity of critical discussion which his work has provoked. His writing is central to literature and culture across the English-speaking world. In this important new anthology, Steven Connor gathers together representative examples of the range of new critical approaches to Dickens over the last two decades.

Puts into practice four different kinds of theoretical readings of Dickens' work: structuralist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic and Marxist.

Charles Dickens (Warwick Studies in Industrial Relations)

Blackwell*publishers

Charles Dickens

Blackwell Pub.

Postmodernist culture: An introduction to theories of the contemporary

In exploring postmodern debates across disciplines and genres, the author considers the institutional conditions and intellectual regroupings which frame postmodern theory and shows that the theory, although proclaiming a diversity in global culture, is itself a form of intellectual containment. He discusses the theory in philosophy, political theory, architecture, art, photography, literature, drama, film, television, popular culture, media and contemporary cultural politics and treats the postmodernist debate as a self-reflexive phenomenon, whose nature and form reflect the conditions of the postmodern. The author's previous books are "Samuel Beckett, Repetition, Theory and Text" and "Charles Dickens".

Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary

Blackwell

Theory and Cultural Value

This book aims to provide a clear and perceptive analysis of the theories of cultural value offered by pschoanalysis, neopragmatism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, postmodernism, discourse theory and contemporary ethnography. The book is also an exploration of the strange and surprizing relationships between value, negativity, waste and pleasure. Among those whose work is discussed are Freud, Richards, Joyce, Bataille, Adorno, Beckett, Levinas, Derrida, Barthes, Jameson, Eagleton, Habermas, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lyotard, Rorty, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Bordieu, Clifford Geertz and James Clifford. Connor seeks to confront the central questions of value, ethics and aesthetics within contemporary theory and subject them to challenging reformulation. He explores the ways in which literary and cultural theory in the 20th century have both addressed and evaded such questions. The author argues that the question of cultural value is inherently paradoxical, since it requires a simultaneous commitment to the principles of absolutism and relativism that are usually taken as opposites. The function of culture and cultural theory must therefore be to inhabit rather than to escape this condition of paradox, by instituting and conserving the political possibility of continuous, constrained transvaluation.

United States

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Books by Connor, Steven