Enchanting David Bowie

This scintillating collection considers David Bowie's contemporaneity, showing how the star looks very different today—and how every different Bowie is a hero, if just for one day. With each chapter like a crystal ball ricocheting around a multi-level labyrinth, Enchanting David Bowie is full of surprises and delights for the fan and scholar alike. * Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English, Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports and _Deconstructing Brad Pitt *
Consider for a moment, David Bowie’s extraordinary body of work, not just the music, but also his assimilation of different media practices: writing, painting, performance, film and video. This volume coheres around four thematic vectors–space, time, body and memory–to interrogate Bowie’s remarkable corpus of cultural production. In the process, Enchanting David Bowie–itself a standout work–not only illuminates but also construes ‘Bowie’–or versions of Bowie–that are at once compelling and fascinating. * Constantine Verevis, Associate Professor of Film & Screen Studies, Monash University, Australia *
A comprehensive critical study of the enigma that is David Bowie has been a long time coming - and now it's finally here! Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory offers a rich, thoughtful and intellectually challenging series of essays that paint a picture of the complex chameleon that is Bowie. The charismatic array of alter egos, the fascination with cosmic travel, the groundbreaking music that sang its way into the souls of many generations, the transformation of music performance into an art form, the transgressive play with gendered identity - this and so much more makes this collection a must have for anyone serious about Bowie, his identity, his music and his iconic status, which continues to spellbind into the twenty-first century. * Angela Ndalianis, Head of Screen and Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia *
If Bowie, ever the chameleon, is in the habit of leaving aesthetic corpses behind, the goal of Enchanting Bowie is to dissect them. The volume is organized around four thematic concepts: space, time, body, and memory … This may sound disconcerting to Bowiephiles and musicologists, but the end result is actually quite impressive. Bowie’s performance becomes a supple text that can be endlessly reinterpreted. * LA Review of Books *
The overwhelming strength of this volume is its extremely broad definition of Bowie’s ‘work’. From album covers, to a customised jacket, to his atypical eyes, we move far beyond monochrome analysis of lyrical content. Its inter- and cross-disciplinary approach, presenting analysis informed by film-making, fashion, musicology, performance and drama, as well as cultural studies and media and communication, results in some highly creative contributions… The effect of this volume as a whole is that much of Bowie’s output, however familiar to the reader, cannot be viewed in the same way after encountering these contributors’ analyses. * Celebrity Studies *