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Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy
This regards a book the literary genre of works of fiction pertaining to "the arcane" such as works by Umberto Eco (like Dan Brown the author of this The Lure of the Arcane, though providing interesting tidbits, appears to be running damage control).
Attachment 3426
Fascination with the arcane is a driving force in this comprehensive survey of conspiracy fiction. Theodore Ziolkowski traces the evolution of cults, orders, lodges, secret societies, and conspiracies through various literary manifestations?drama, romance, epic, novel, opera?down to the thrillers of the twenty-first century.
Lure of the Arcane considers Euripides’s Bacchae, Andreae’s Chymical Wedding, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, among other seminal works. Mimicking the genre’s quest-driven narrative arc, the reader searches for the significance of conspiracy fiction and is rewarded with the author’s cogent reflections in the final chapter. After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco’s notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact "a secret without content."
A review:
Quote:
Christopher Sutch
Sep 21, 2014
Christopher Sutch rated it liked it
This overview of cult/conspiracy literature from the ancient Greeks to 2009 fills in some gaps in American scholarship in this area, but also has its problems. Here's what I think Ziolkowski does right: he gives prominence to the German bundroman, an area that a lot of literary scholars in America likely know little or nothing about (I didn't, anyway), and he shows how important that genre was in developing the contemporary conspiracy thriller (even though he buries his most important scholarly contributions in the footnotes, so readers who don't turn to the back of the book won't actually know the significance of the author's scholarship). _However_... the vast majority of this text really consists of summaries of the works Ziolkowski is supposedly examining with little or no theoretical insight. Even his "argument" (which he makes reference to continuously) is really just an observation about the content of the works he is reading, and not anything particularly profound or theoretically valuable, which makes this book suffer as a piece of scholarship. So this work serves as a good sourcebook for the history of the novel of conspiracy, but doesn't give real insight into the genre or why (some of us) enjoy reading it.
Related:
Cult Writers
