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Overview
With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous - as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision - in literature, art, and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world, and regenerate Eden.
Ducornet playfully investigates works of literature, art, and film that create ruptures in our sense of normality. ...[She] shows how the road of excess indeed leads to the palace of wisdom. Most important, however, her ability to transfix and communicate her sense of wonder becomes wondrous in itself, making these essays read with the same quirky delight as her fiction."—Rain Taxi
Table of Contents:
Waking to Eden Optical Terror The Impossible Genus On Returning from Chiapas Alphabets and Emperors Optical Pleasure Haunting by Water Mapping Paris The Monstrous and the Marvelous The Death Cunt of Deep Dell Sortilege Books of Nature A Dream Manifesto in Voices Acknowledgments Bibliography
Synopsis
With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous - as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision - in literature, art, and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world, and regenerate Eden.
Ducornet playfully investigates works of literature, art, and film that create ruptures in our sense of normality. ...[She] shows how the road of excess indeed leads to the palace of wisdom. Most important, however, her ability to transfix and communicate her sense of wonder becomes wondrous in itself, making these essays read with the same quirky delight as her fiction."—Rain Taxi
Table of Contents:
Waking to Eden Optical Terror The Impossible Genus On Returning from Chiapas Alphabets and Emperors Optical Pleasure Haunting by Water Mapping Paris The Monstrous and the Marvelous The Death Cunt of Deep Dell Sortilege Books of Nature A Dream Manifesto in Voices Acknowledgments Bibliography