The Dream of the Moving Statue

By Kenneth Gross

Book Overview

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 the 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271029005
• ISBN13: 9780271029009
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Interesting to read and full of creative ideas

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.

One of the strangest and most interesting books of literary criticism of the last forty years

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.