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Technologies of Belief

其他書名	Christian Visions of U.S. Secularism, 1880-1930
出版	University of Pennsylvania, 2013
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=477UoAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"Technologies of Belief: Christian Visions of U.S. Secularism, 1880-1930," explores the relationship between spectatorship and secularization at the turn of the twentieth century. It looks to a series of visualizations of the life of Jesus Christ that articulate the intertwined evolution of spirituality and visual media in this period--Lew Wallace's 1880 virtual tour novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ; the early Passion Play films of Edison, Pathe, Gaumont, and Kalem; the spectral Christ in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation; W.E.B. Du Bois's illustrated "Black Christ" stories in The Crisis; and the Technicolor resurrection of Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings. My dissertation argues that this archive, rather than reaffirming the common narrative of a secularization that ends with the commodification and disintegration of religion, actually revitalized many aspects of Christian belief by enshrining them within new media and technological environments. These texts--in their visual depiction of Christ's miracles--merge the traditions of realism and fantasy, actuality film and trick film to create what I call a spectacular realism. Engaging with new and emerging work in secularism studies, "Technologies of Belief" suggests a new understanding of the relationship between visuality, faith, and new media at the turn of the twentieth century.