We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books)
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, The Gothic
Product Description A media archaeology that traces connections between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, considering topics that range from Kant's philosophy to somnambulist clairvoyants. Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology. Stefan Andriopoulos examines the relationships between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant's philosophy and the magic lantern's phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television. As Kant was writing about the possibility of spiritual apparitions, the emerging medium of the phantasmagoria used hidden magic lanterns to terrify audiences with ghostly projections. Andriopoulos juxtaposes the philosophical arguments of German idealism with contemporaneous occultism and ghost shows. In close readings of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, he traces the diverging ways in which these authors appropriate optical media effects and spiritualist notions. The spectral apparitions from this period also intersect with an exploding print market and the rise of immersive reading practices. Andriopoulos explores the circulation of ostensibly genuine ghost narratives and Gothic fiction, which was said to produce “reading addiction” and a loss of reality. Romantic representations of animal magnetism and clairvoyance similarly blurred the boundary between fiction and reality. In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe adapted a German case history that described a magnetic clairvoyant as arrested in the moment of dying. Yet even though Poe's tale belonged to the realm of literary fiction, it was reprinted as an authentic news item. Andriopoulos extends this archaeology of new media into the early twentieth century. Tracing a reciprocal interaction between occultism and engineering, he reveals how spiritualist research into the psychic “television” of somnambulist clairvoyants enabled the concurrent emergence of the technical medium. Review “Probing at the roots of modern thought and modern media with both scholarly rigor and originality, Andriopoulos uncovers the phantasmagoria of images that haunt the formation of the modern imagination. The ghostly reveals itself as less the realm of ancient superstition and folklore than the seedbed of a new intellectual, artistic, and technological world in which the visible and the material can diverge, and the power of ideas and visual media seem to mime the uncanny effects of apparitions. This is an exciting, and occasionally startling, work of cultural history.” ― Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago “Focusing on intersections of new media technologies, philosophy, and literature, this book throws an entirely new and utterly fascinating light on the emergence of German idealism. Lucidly and forcefully argued, it provides us with a media archeology that connects the cultural background of Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Schopenhauer’s thought with discussions of optical instruments and occultism as well as with Romanticism and the Gothic novel. Andriopoulos thereby changes the way in which we read the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, producing an intricate picture of material practices, new media, philosophical theory, and poetic styles.” ― Niklaus Largier, Sidney and Margaret Ancker Chair in the Humanities, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley From the Inside Flap "Probing at the roots of modern thought and modern media with both scholarly rigor and originality, Andriopoulos uncovers the phantasmagoria of images that haunt the formation of the modern imagination. The ghostly reveals itself as less the realm of ancient superstition and folklore than the seedbed of a new intellectual, artistic, and technological world in which the visible and the material can diverge, and the power of id
