The Dream of the Moving Statue [Paperback]

Kenneth Gross (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006

We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak and remain silent. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue offers a far-ranging and probing exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined the power and life of statues, real and metaphoric, taking up examples from antiquity to modernity, from Ovid, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare to Freud, Rilke, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is about fate of works of art and about the fate of our fantasies, words, and bodies, about the metamorphoses they undergo in our own and others' minds.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Exploring a perennial fascination with the idea an animated statue and its converse (petrifaction of living individuals), Gross both delights and instructs the reader through an exploration of a quite astonishing number of significant examples that include poetry, film, drama, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, to say nothing of a few famous statues themselves. The style is inimitable: graceful, sophisticated, and seductive in the display of a sensibility that is at once both unique and accessible. The few pages of the preface alone give a hint of the riches that lie within, continually provoking the reader with the exhilarating experience of new insights into the workings of the imagination, the arousal of fear and desire, and the dangerously porous borderlines between the inanimate and the animate, the object and the subject, and finally, between death and life. --Froma I. Zeitlin, Princeton University, author of Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greece

Kenneth Gross conveys with acumen, passion, and originality the fascination that statues have exercised over the imagination since antiquity. His exploration of mythology and legends - from the petrifying stare of the Gorgon Medusa to the figure that comes to life when Pygmalion kisses his handiwork - reveals their psychological complexity and philosophical richness. Effigies, puppets, and replicas open up questions about reality and unreality, and lead us to consider the ontology of representations. Indeed The Dream of the Moving Statue, first published in l992 when computer simulations and virtual reality were still unfamiliar, was prophetic in its concerns. --Marina Warner, novelist, critic, historian, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, author of Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media

Kenneth Gross's moving statues book is one of the most stimulating discussions of sculpture and the aesthetics of statuary that I have ever read. It has had a significant influence on both literary scholars and art historians. Gross's book is beautifully wrought, highly suggestive, and deeply stimulating. It deserves to remain in print. --Paul Barolsky, University of Virginia

About the Author

Kenneth Gross is also the author of Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (1985), Shakespeare's Noise (2001), and Shylock is Shakespeare (forthcoming in 2006). He teaches English at the University of Rochester.

Product Details

• Paperback: 251 pages
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0271029005
• ISBN-13: 978-0271029009
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,298,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting to read and full of creative ideas, October 4, 2007

By 

O. K. Marron - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dream of the Moving Statue (Paperback)

The book covers a broad gamut of subjects and genres (film, poetry, etc.), and presents many interesting ideas. It is a pleasure to read for literature and visual art lovers alike. Many of the analyses employ a Freudian theory approach. I found the text useful for my doctoral research on animation of objects, specifically because it made me aware of the difficulty in differentiating between animation that is inherent in the object versus animation generated in the eyes (and brain) of the beholders.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the strangest and most interesting books of literary criticism of the last forty years, August 4, 2006

By 

Matthew Greenfield "Nothing if not critical" (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dream of the Moving Statue (Paperback)

This is one of the few books of criticism which I return to for inspiration: it reminds me why I decided to become a literary critic. The book constructs a quirky pantheon of stories about statues and bodies: the artists discussed include Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, Wittgenstein, Pushkin, and Freud, among others. The arguments are always both surprising and wholly persuasive, and the writing has a sumptuous elegance. I am delighted that the book is being reprinted in paperback, and I hope that it gets the attention it deserves.