Book description
What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our
consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, carry a reader or
viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have long
recognized the power of individuals to lead or enchant by the force of
personal charisma-and indeed, in his award-winning Envy of
Angels, Jaeger himself brilliantly parsed the ability of
charismatic teachers to shape the world of medieval learning. In
Enchantment, he turns his attention to a sweeping and
multifaceted exploration of the charisma not of individuals but of art.
For Jaeger, the charisma of the visual arts, literature, and
film functions by creating an exalted semblance of life, a realm of
beauty, sublime emotions, heroic motives and deeds, godlike bodies and
actions, and superhuman abilities, so as to dazzle the humbled
spectator and lift him or her up into the place so represented.
Charismatic art makes us want to live in the higher world that it
depicts, to behave like its heroes and heroines, and to think and act
according to their values. It temporarily weakens individual will and
rational critical thought. It brings us into a state of enchantment.
Ranging widely across periods and genres, Enchantment
investigates the charismatic effect of an ancient statue of Apollo on
the poet Rilke, of the painter Dürer's self-portrayal as a figure of
Christ-like magnificence, of a numinous Odysseus washed ashore on
Phaeacia, and of the black-and-white projection of Fred Astaire
dancing across the Depression-era movie screen. From the tattoos on
the face of a Maori tribesman to the haunting visage of Charlotte
Rampling in a film by Woody Allen, Jaeger's extraordinary book
explores the dichotomies of reality and illusion, life and art that
are fundamental to both cultic and aesthetic experience.
"Enchantment formulates a compelling theory of
charismatic art as an alternative to our Western preoccupation with
mimesis and hermeneutics. With the learning, passion, and verve
familiar from his distinguished medieval scholarship, Jaeger's
argument ranges magisterially from the body art of primitive cultures,
through Classical epic, medieval sculpture, pedagogy and romance (the
high point of charismatic culture in the West), all the way to Rilke
and American cinema."-Jane K. Brown, University of Washington
C. Stephen Jaeger is Gutsgell Professor Emeritus in the Departments
of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Envy
of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe,
950-1200, winner of the 1995 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History,
and Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility, both of which are
available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
