Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Charisma and Art
Chapter 2. Living Art and Its Surrogates: The Genesis of Charismatic Art
Chapter 3. Odysseus Rising: The Homeric World
Chapter 4. Icon and Relic
Chapter 5. Charismatic Culture and Its Media: Gothic Sculpture and Medieval Humanism
Chapter 6. Romance and Adventure
Chapter 7. Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait (1500): The Face and Its Contents
Chapter 8. Book Burning at Don Quixote's
Chapter 9. Goethe's Faust and the Limits of the Imagination
Chapter 10. The Statue Changes Rilke's Life
Chapter 11. Grand Illusions: Classic American Cinema
Chapter 12. Lost Illusions: American Neorealism and Hitchcock's Vertigo
Chapter 13. Woody Allen: Allan Felix's Glasses and Cecilia's Smile
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

This book examines charisma as the force in art, literature, and film that engages the reader's or viewer's consciousness and inspires admiration and imitation. Thirteen chapters analyze the workings of charisma and its effects, ranging from Homer to Woody Allen.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"In a wide-ranging and stimulating study, C. Stephen Jaeger argues that charisma is the sublime in human presence. . . . Jaeger makes a good case for the enchantment of the reader or spectator, a thread that enables him both to bring together very different cultural artefacts and to conclude with a plea that enchantment should be integral to education."
*Modern Language Review*

"Enchantment is, as usual with Jaeger's books, extremely rich in terms of fascinating hypotheses and cues for discussion. The style is always clear and eloquent, and the authors and the works discussed cover a very wide span of time, from Homer to Federico Fellini and Woody Allen."
*Philosophical Inquiries*

"C. Stephen Jaeger's magnificent, generous, and wide-ranging study has at its heart all that which is life-affirming. At every turn we encounter vigorous, eloquent, and intellectually consistent challenges to the division of art and experience. Readers in and between many disciplines will find this deeply perceptive account of the magical workings of enchantment, charisma, and the sublime in texts, images and bodies, empowering and uplifting. It cannot fail to influence the next generation of thought about the arts and media more generally."
*Paul Binski, University of Cambridge*

"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*

"An intelligent, thought-provoking, and compelling discussion of the phenomenon of personal charisma and its transformative effects. C. Stephen Jaeger takes the reader through a stunning series of examples from literature, the visual arts, and film across a very broad historical range, from classical antiquity to the present. Throughout, he presents his claims in highly communicative and inviting prose. A sheer pleasure to read."
*John T. Hamilton, Harvard University*