This sounds like a most interesting book. I have long been fascinated by lighthouses and their liminal location between land and sea, throwing light into the darkness, guiding benighted travellers across rough seas and away from hidden rocks. They also form a minor theme in science fiction – representing that border point between the unknown and the known and the possibility of the intrusion of the otherworldly. Lighthouses appear in Doctor Who on at least a couple of occasions and also in the 1962 film version of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. They also make an appearance in horror and supernatural films such as the strange and atmospheric 1948 film Portrait of Jennie.
From the Lighthouse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Light, edited by Veronica Strang, Tim Edensor, and Joanna Puckering – now out with Routledge.
What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole ‘family’ of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and…
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