The book is a collection of essays and images that inspired Zoe Beloffs video installation, The Somnambulists 2008. Comprised of five miniature wooden theaters into which moving images are projected, her work centers on the idea of staging the unconscious . Each theater presents a hysterical drama. These include History of a Fixed Idea and A Modern Case of Possession in which two patients of the famous French psycho-pathologist Pierre Janet, express their delusions in song. Other theaters present the ghostly specters of actual hysterics filmed by doctors a hundred years ago. The texts and images included in the book illuminate the complex interweaving of ideas from psychology, writing, performance, art, and moving-image technology at the end of the 19th century. It begins with an introduction to the Players; brief biographies of the scholars, artists, and performers who appear in this volume. The texts include Pierre Janets case study of the writer Raymond Roussel, the Surrealists celebration of hysteria as the greatest poetical invention of the 19th century in The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria and the pioneering psychic researcher Frederic W.H. Myers commentary on Janets contribution to the discovery of the unconscious. Also included are rarely seen photographs by Albert von Schrenck Notzing of artistic production under the influence of hypnosis including images of the celebrated dream dancer Magdelaine G. Included with the book is a DVD-ROM in which Beloffs installation can be viewed as an interactive work for Mac and PC.

The Somnambulists

André Breton

Louis Aragon

Zoe Beloff

Pierre Janet

Raymond Roussel

Frederic W H Myers

Henry Dircks

Gheorghe Marinesco

Christine Burgin

Locus Solus;

Calder & Boyars

Locus Solus

Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century.Cantarel, a scholarly scientist, whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity, is taking a group of visitors on a tour of "Locus Solus", his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Calder Publications

How I wrote certain of my books

John Ashbery

Kenneth Koch

Trevor Winkfield

Reference

Extrait: ...procurer quelques pages vierges, le prisonnier r

Locus Solus (French Edition)

Livres Généraux

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Books by Raymond Roussel