Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

Kenneth Gross

ISBN 10: 0226309584 / ISBN 13: 9780226309583

Published by University Of Chicago Press, 2011

About this Item

The puppet can entertain or terrify, evoke the innocence of childhood, or become a magical entity, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. This book takes us on a meditative journey through the world of puppet theater, exploring the mysterious fascination of these unsettling objects. Num Pages: 224 pages, 4 colour plates, 24 halftones. BIC Classification: ASZM; DSB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 217 x 159 x 20. Weight in Grams: 386. . 2011. First Edition. Hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780226309583

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226309584
• ISBN 13: 9780226309583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life.

The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

About the Author

Kenneth Gross’s books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise, Shylock is Shakespeare, and Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, which won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. A former fellow of the Guggenheim and Bogliasco Foundations, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bellagio Study Center, and the American Academy in Berlin, he teaches English at the University of Rochester. His personal website is kennethgross.me.