Screens and Illusionism

Peter J. Bloom is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has been focused on film and media studies with a regional focus on West Africa, North Africa and Southeast Asia. He has published extensively on Belgian, British and French colonial media, and is currently preparing a monograph under the title, Radio-Cinema Modernity: The Catoptrics of Empire. He is the co-editor of Screens and Illusionism (2024, EUP). Dominique Jullien is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She publishes on reception and translation studies, East-West dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Her current book project explores technologies of optical mediation, illusionism and secular magic in contemporary fiction. She is co-editor of Screens and Illusionism (2024, EUP).

The contributors to this probing and various essay collection explore how optical toys reveal the limits of our sense perceptions, while new techniques of representation continue to augment what we see and how we see it. Yet, as the editors of Screens and Illusionism are keen to emphasise, the effects of new media are not all ominous, but the delightful fruits of human ingenuity, playfulness, and an unimpeachable pursuit of pleasure. This rich collection enhances our ways of seeing; it places within the reader’s grasp powerful new instruments of understanding and perception.

• 1. Introduction - Peter J. Bloom and Dominique JullienPart I: Screens as perceptual vehicles2. Does Size Matter? Screens, Illusions, and Moving Picture Dispositives - Erkki Huhtamo3. Not Understanding Media: From Optical Toys to Artificial Intelligence - Tomáš Dvořák 4. From Eyes to Hands: Behind the Embrace of the “Screen-Free” Playscape - Meredith A. Bak5. Wandering Eyes: A Meditation on Animated Deep Space Devices of Wonder - Colin Williamson Part II: Mediation and its Avatars6. Resurrections of the Dead. The Technological Uncanny of Ghost Production - Katharina Rein 7. Showing the Impossible: The Anatomy of a Cinematic Trick Image - Frank Kessler8. The Flight of the Nightingale in the era of #BlackLivesMatter - Peter J. Bloom 9. No Strings Attached: Forms of Corruption - John Mowitt 10. Talking Furniture: Féeries for a Troubled Time in Proust, Ravel and Chomón - Dominique Jullien Part III: Alternative Teleologies of Media11. "Amid the moving pageant": Wordsworth’s Photographic Encounters - Claire Grandy12. Waves from An Old Film: The Aging of Cinema and the Uncanny Earth - Herschel Farbman