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WE HAVE MANY THINGS to be concerned about today. Why, for example, are there numerous people dressed in funny costumes to be found in movie theaters across America? Why is there a Bloomsday, and why do people outside of Dublin actually celebrate it? Why are there detailed concordances to the X-Files, atlases to Middle-Earth, and almost as many published biographies of Sherlock Holmes as there are of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Why are there at least two editions of the Necronomicon, a book that never existed until its title (and little else) was made up by H. P. Lovecraft, a 1920s pulp fiction author? Why will the new edition of the British Dictionary of National Biography, scheduled for publication in 2004, contain entries for John Bull, Springheel Jack, and Robin Hood?1 And-a central impetus behind my own research into these questions-why can't I find a single copy of my own monograph in any bookstore, but I can find many copies of Hamlet translated into Klingon? (I tell myself it's because Hamlet was written by Shakespeare.)
Potential answers to these questions emerge when we look at the issue of modernity and enchantment in the West. From the late eighteenth century through the present, the dominant understanding of modernity has been that it is incompatible with enchantment. The term "modernity" has usually been understood as encompassing the ongoing diffusion of rationality, secularism, democracy, urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization. These processes, according to romantic writers in the late eighteenth century, seemed to provide little room for "enchantment"-that sense of delight and astonishment at the wonders, marvels, and mysteries that they believed had been intrinsic to the premodern world view. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Max Weber famously discussed "the disenchantment of the world"-the removal of magic and meaning from life through the processes of rationalization, transforming modern existence into, as he put it, "an iron cage of reason."2
Weber's phrases captured the temper of his time: by the late nineteenth century the association between modernity and disenchantment was a common trope in Western Europe and America. The negative effects of industrialization, urbanization, mass politics, and mass culture were widely discussed by intellectuals, and the triumph of scientific naturalism in the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution...