1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910820583703321

Autore

Ackerman Alan L (Alan Louis)

Titolo

Seeing things : from Shakespeare to Pixar / / Alan Ackerman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Canada] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2011

©2011

ISBN

1-4426-9653-2

1-4426-9652-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (180 p.)

Disciplina

700.105

Soggetti

Visual perception

Visualization in literature

Imagination in literature

Imagery (Psychology) in literature

Imagery (Psychology) in motion pictures

Philosophy in literature

Philosophy in motion pictures

Visual perception in literature

Visual communication

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

1 A Spirit of Giving in A Midsummer Night 's Dream -- 2 Visualizing Hamlet's Ghost: The Theatrical Spirit of Modern Subjectivity -- 3 Samuel Beckett's spectres du noir: The Being of Painting and The Flatness of Film -- 4 The Spirit of Toys: Resurrection, Redemption, and Consumption in Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Beyond.

Sommario/riassunto

"A technological revolution has changed the way we see things. The storytelling media employed by Pixar Animation Studios, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare differ greatly, yet these creators share a collective fascination with the nebulous boundary between material objects and our imaginative selves. How do the acts of seeing and believing remain linked? Alan Ackerman charts the dynamic history of



interactions between showing and knowing in Seeing Things, a richly interdisciplinary study which illuminates changing modes of perception and modern representational media. Seeing Things demonstrates that the airy nothings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Ghost in Hamlet, and soulless bodies in Beckett's media experiments, alongside Toy Story's digitally animated toys, all serve to illustrate the modern problem of visualizing, as Hamlet put it, 'that within which passes show.' Ackerman carefully analyses such ghostly appearances and disappearances across cultural forms and contexts from the early modern period to the present, investigating the tension between our distrust of shadows and our abiding desire to believe in invisible realities. Seeing Things provides a fresh and surprising cultural history through theatrical, verbal, pictorial, and cinematic representations."--Pub. desc.