The Dream of the Moving Statue
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 GreeceKenneth 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 MediaKenneth 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 VirginiaKenneth 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 MediaKenneth 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