The Secret Life of Puppets

Author: Victoria Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674041410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

The Motion of Puppets

Author: Keith Donohue
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250057213
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Boy Who Drew Monsters and The Stolen Child comes a modern take on the Orpheus and Eurydice Myth—A Suspenseful tale of romance and enchantment In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside. The next morning Theo wakes up to discover his wife is missing. Under police suspicion and frantic at her disappearance, he obsessively searches the streets of the Old City. Meanwhile, Kay has been transformed into a puppet, and is now a prisoner of the back room of the Quatre Mains, trapped with an odd assemblage of puppets from all over the world who can only come alive between the hours of midnight and dawn. The only way she can return to the human world is if Theo can find her and recognize her in her new form. So begins the dual odyssey of Keith Donohue’s The Motion of Puppets: of a husband determined to find his wife, and of a woman trapped in a magical world where her life is not her own.

Gothicka

Author: Victoria Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065409
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
To explain the millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic--the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration. Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.

The Quantum Magician

Author: Derek Künsken
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1786181134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Book Description

Puppet

Author: Kenneth Gross
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226309606
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
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.

You Will Call Me Drog

Author: Sue Cowing
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books ®
ISBN: 1467732230
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
Parker is a normal sixth grader—or he was normal before the puppet. It’s just an old hand puppet, sticking out of a garbage can, and even though Parker’s best friend says leave it, Parker brings the puppet home and tries it on. Or maybe it tries him on. “You will call me Drog!” the puppet commands once they’re alone. And now, no matter how hard Parker tries, he can’t get Drog off his hand. Drog is sarcastic, cruel, unpredictable, and loud—everything Parker isn’t. Worse yet, no one believes that Drog—not Parker—is the one saying the outrageous things that get Parker into trouble. Then Drog starts sharpening his snarky wit on the most fragile parts of Parker’s life—like his parents’ divorce. Parker’s shocked, but deep down he agrees with Drog a little. Perhaps Drog is saying things Parker wants to say after all. Maybe the only way to get rid of Drog is to truly listen to him.

The Puppet Boy of Warsaw

Author: Eva Weaver
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 0297868292
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
The story of Mika, a Jewish boy, who becomes a puppeteer in the Warsaw ghetto - a stunning debut for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and Schindler's List I was twelve when the coat was made. Nathan, our tailor and dear friend, cut it for Grandfather in the first week of March 1938. It was the last week of freedom for Warsaw and for us... Even in the most difficult of lives, there is hope. And sometimes that hope comes in the form of a small boy, armed with a troupe of puppets - a prince, a girl, a fool, a crocodile with half-painted teeth.... When Mika's grandfather dies in the Warsaw ghetto, he inherits not only his great coat, but its treasure trove of secrets. In one remote pocket, he finds a papier mache head, a scrap of cloth...the prince. And what better way to cheer the cousin who has lost her father, the little boy who his ill, the neighbours living in one cramped room, than a puppet show? Soon the whole ghetto is talking about the puppet boy - until the day when Mika is stopped by a German officer and is forced into a secret life... This is a story about survival. It is an epic journey, spanning continents and generations, from Warsaw to the gulags of Siberia, and two lives that intertwine amid the chaos of war. Because even in wartime, there is hope...

Ashley Bryan's Puppets

Author: Ashley Bryan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442487291
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
Beloved Coretta Scott King Award–winning storyteller and creator Ashley Bryan reveals the vibrant spirit of found objects in this magnificent treasury of poetry and puppets. Little Cranberry Island. It’s a small island, with fewer than a hundred inhabitants, but it’s got more than its share of treasures—including the magnificent Ashley Bryan himself, a world-renowned storyteller and author of such classics as All Night, All Day and Beautiful Blackbird. Daily, for decades, Ashley has walked up and down the beach, stopping to pick up sea glass, weathered bones, a tangle of fishing net, an empty bottle, a doorknob. Treasure. And then, with glue and thread and paint and a sprinkling of African folklore, Ashley breathes new life into these materials. Others might consider it beach junk, but Ashley sees worlds of possibilities. Ashley Bryan’s two-foot-tall hand puppets swell with personality and beauty, and in this majestic collection they make their literary debut, each with a poem that tells of their creation and further enlivens their spirit.

The Puppet Masters

Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Publisher: Baen
ISBN: 9781439133767
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Now in Mass Market. An Epic Battle Against Mind-Controlling Alien Invaders as Only Robert A. Heinlein, the Best-Selling Grand Master of Science Fiction, Could Tell It. “One of the most influential writers in American literature.” —The New York Times Book Review. First came the news that a flying saucer had landed in Iowa. Then came the announcement that the whole thing was a hoax. End of story. Case closed. Except that two agents of the most secret intelligence agency in the U.S. government were on the scene and disappeared without reporting in. And four more agents who were sent in also disappeared. So the head of the agency and his two top agents went in and managed to get out with their discovery: an invasion is underway by slug-like aliens who can touch a human and completely control his or her mind. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And most of Iowa is already under their control. Sam Cavanaugh was one of the agents who discovered the truth. Unfortunately, that was just before he was taken over by one of the aliens and began working for the invaders, with no will of his own. And he has just learned that a high official in the Treasury Department is now under control of the aliens. Since the Treasury Department includes the Secret Service, which safeguards the President of the United States, control of the entire nation is near at hand .

Sock Puppet Madness

Author: Marty Allen
Publisher: CICO Books
ISBN: 9781908862679
Category : Hand puppets
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
It's a simple equation: old sock + craft foam x glue = a collection of the most amazing incredible, outrageous, awe-inspiring sock puppets you've ever seen. Sock Puppet Madness includes 35 of the most fun, outlandish, off-the-wall and enchanting characters on the planet, and by following the simple step-by-step instructions, you'll be able to put together your own puppet in no time. Take Bawston the ornery cat puppet, for example. He's a baseball fan with a questionable temper, so watch what you say to him. A more friendly guy is Sebastian Metaphor. He may seem aloof with his hipster appearance but behind those sleepy eyes lies a heart of gold. If you're a sophisticated sort why not have a crack at Penelope Durtlinger, an heiress to a small fortune with an insatiable thirst for power. All the puppets are so simple to create, using just a few readily available materials that cost next to nothing - plus everyone has an old sock they can use, right? So what are you waiting for? Buy this now and make your own collection of sock puppets and join in the fun. And once you've made all the projects, why not create your own characters based on friends and family, too.