Ned Schantz
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195335910
- eISBN:
- 9780199868902
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335910.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, Women's Literature
For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the ...
More
For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the anxious reaction. But behind this broad anxiety lurks a powerful ideal of sympathetic and strategic female networks, an ideal that takes its intimate shape from the expectations of communications media, and that underwrites the very culture that would deny it. The book examines novelistic culture from the British novel to Hollywood film as a series of responses to the threat and promise of female networks. In texts from Clarissa, Emma, and The Portrait of a Lady to Sorry, Wrong Number, Vertigo, and You’ve Got Mail, it argues that a recurring gothic nightmare haunts plots of courtship and marriage, and that the concept of female networks illuminates the exits, for culture and criticism alike. And while this study must of necessity visit an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the power at stake in the most basic modes of female communication, in gossip, letters, and phones.Less
For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the anxious reaction. But behind this broad anxiety lurks a powerful ideal of sympathetic and strategic female networks, an ideal that takes its intimate shape from the expectations of communications media, and that underwrites the very culture that would deny it. The book examines novelistic culture from the British novel to Hollywood film as a series of responses to the threat and promise of female networks. In texts from Clarissa, Emma, and The Portrait of a Lady to Sorry, Wrong Number, Vertigo, and You’ve Got Mail, it argues that a recurring gothic nightmare haunts plots of courtship and marriage, and that the concept of female networks illuminates the exits, for culture and criticism alike. And while this study must of necessity visit an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the power at stake in the most basic modes of female communication, in gossip, letters, and phones.
Peter J. Bowler
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266915
- eISBN:
- 9780191938177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266915.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the ...
More
This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.Less
This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Ned Schantz
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195335910
- eISBN:
- 9780199868902
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335910.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, Women's Literature
This chapter pursues the problem of coincidence on the telephone in its greatest cinematic example—Sorry, Wrong Number—all the way to the ambivalent dream of telepathy, a major fantasy of novelistic ...
More
This chapter pursues the problem of coincidence on the telephone in its greatest cinematic example—Sorry, Wrong Number—all the way to the ambivalent dream of telepathy, a major fantasy of novelistic culture and troubling concern for film. Telepathy then structures a sustained comparison between film and the novel in terms of access to characters’ minds, a comparison developed in an extended reading of Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock’s film finally represents a turning away from telepathy and female knowledge—the double—edged legacy of the novel—toward a cinema of female mobility and speed.Less
This chapter pursues the problem of coincidence on the telephone in its greatest cinematic example—Sorry, Wrong Number—all the way to the ambivalent dream of telepathy, a major fantasy of novelistic culture and troubling concern for film. Telepathy then structures a sustained comparison between film and the novel in terms of access to characters’ minds, a comparison developed in an extended reading of Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock’s film finally represents a turning away from telepathy and female knowledge—the double—edged legacy of the novel—toward a cinema of female mobility and speed.
N. J. Lowe
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199208791
- eISBN:
- 9780191709029
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208791.003.0018
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter discusses Murray's experiments in telepathy. It is argued that Murray was England's leading telepath, and that the account of Murray's experiments in this underlines with especial force ...
More
This chapter discusses Murray's experiments in telepathy. It is argued that Murray was England's leading telepath, and that the account of Murray's experiments in this underlines with especial force the width of Murray's interests and achievements.Less
This chapter discusses Murray's experiments in telepathy. It is argued that Murray was England's leading telepath, and that the account of Murray's experiments in this underlines with especial force the width of Murray's interests and achievements.
Mary Jacobus
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184348
- eISBN:
- 9780191674211
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184348.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic ...
More
Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic communication method. His concept was probably based on several earlier notions regarding one's ability to directly communicate with others. Also, it addresses psychoanalytic concepts about unconscious communication and unconscious intersubjective exchanges between the text and its readers. Autobiographical memoirs and epistolary fiction play no small part in creating subjectivity as these ideas connect together the origins of the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter utilizes Mary Hay's Memoirs of Emma Courtney as a part of the Enlightenment project in the studying of the human mind. Particular focus is drawn to an ideal communication form referred to as the ‘vehicular state’.Less
Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic communication method. His concept was probably based on several earlier notions regarding one's ability to directly communicate with others. Also, it addresses psychoanalytic concepts about unconscious communication and unconscious intersubjective exchanges between the text and its readers. Autobiographical memoirs and epistolary fiction play no small part in creating subjectivity as these ideas connect together the origins of the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter utilizes Mary Hay's Memoirs of Emma Courtney as a part of the Enlightenment project in the studying of the human mind. Particular focus is drawn to an ideal communication form referred to as the ‘vehicular state’.
Alaina Lemon
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520294271
- eISBN:
- 9780520967458
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520294271.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Global
Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the twentieth-century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love ...
More
Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the twentieth-century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love and collective effervescence. Both extremes materialized over time, along tangled circuits of wars, events, and interactions staged across borders since at least the nineteenth century. The Cold War and its fences fed fascination with the workings and the failures of contact and communication. Opposed sides accused each other of jamming media and spinning propaganda even while they mirrored fantasies of connection. This book contrasts and connects Russian and American channels and means to check channels, with special attention to intersections of the telepathic with the theatrical. It theorizes links between historically layered struggles over technologies for intuition and dominant models of communication—commonsense or theoretical. It demonstrates that theories resting on models of individual sincerity and of dyadic communication warp understandings of the Soviet Union and Russia—and thus of the United States as well. It proposes that attention to the means of making and checking contact, that is, to the phatic functions in language, offers a way out of the impasses and paradoxes of paranoia.Less
Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the twentieth-century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love and collective effervescence. Both extremes materialized over time, along tangled circuits of wars, events, and interactions staged across borders since at least the nineteenth century. The Cold War and its fences fed fascination with the workings and the failures of contact and communication. Opposed sides accused each other of jamming media and spinning propaganda even while they mirrored fantasies of connection. This book contrasts and connects Russian and American channels and means to check channels, with special attention to intersections of the telepathic with the theatrical. It theorizes links between historically layered struggles over technologies for intuition and dominant models of communication—commonsense or theoretical. It demonstrates that theories resting on models of individual sincerity and of dyadic communication warp understandings of the Soviet Union and Russia—and thus of the United States as well. It proposes that attention to the means of making and checking contact, that is, to the phatic functions in language, offers a way out of the impasses and paradoxes of paranoia.
DAVID J. BARTHOLOMEW
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198270140
- eISBN:
- 9780191683923
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198270140.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter focuses on the paranormal — a collection of things such as telepathy, precognition, the occult, astrology, and the like — as another set of phenomena that does not necessarily entail ...
More
This chapter focuses on the paranormal — a collection of things such as telepathy, precognition, the occult, astrology, and the like — as another set of phenomena that does not necessarily entail religion, but could also serve as basis for claiming that science cannot explain everything in this world. Analyzing such phenomena has a surer foundation because of its accessibility to scientific investigation; also, as several people take these seriously, Christians take interest in exposing these as false beliefs. The chapter attempts to answer the following questions: Are there any genuine paranormal events? Do these events result from unrecognized laws of nature? What do such events tell us about what is external to the world of senses?Less
This chapter focuses on the paranormal — a collection of things such as telepathy, precognition, the occult, astrology, and the like — as another set of phenomena that does not necessarily entail religion, but could also serve as basis for claiming that science cannot explain everything in this world. Analyzing such phenomena has a surer foundation because of its accessibility to scientific investigation; also, as several people take these seriously, Christians take interest in exposing these as false beliefs. The chapter attempts to answer the following questions: Are there any genuine paranormal events? Do these events result from unrecognized laws of nature? What do such events tell us about what is external to the world of senses?
Peter Szendy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823267057
- eISBN:
- 9780823272303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823267057.003.0017
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Theories of piano playing like Marie Jaëll’s join Freud’s considerations on telepathy or Benjamin’s on innervation as action at a distance.
Theories of piano playing like Marie Jaëll’s join Freud’s considerations on telepathy or Benjamin’s on innervation as action at a distance.
Susan McCabe
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- October 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190621223
- eISBN:
- 9780190621254
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190621223.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This dual biography takes on the daring task of examining how two women, who didn’t feel like women, survived as a couple, raising an illegitimate child during a period when such arrangements were ...
More
This dual biography takes on the daring task of examining how two women, who didn’t feel like women, survived as a couple, raising an illegitimate child during a period when such arrangements were frowned upon, if even recognized. When they met in 1918, H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle in 1886), had already achieved recognition as an Imagist poet, engaged in a lesbian affair, was married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and was pregnant by another. She fell in love with Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1894), who was trapped both in a female body and in the shadow of her father, Sir John Ellerman, a wealthy shipping magnate. They felt a telepathic and electric connection, bonding over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history, and a shared bodily dysphoria. Bryher introduced H.D. to cinema, psychoanalysis, and politics, herself rescuing refugees from Nazis throughout the 1930s. Bryher engaged in legal strategies to protect H.D., marrying Kenneth Macpherson, who adopted H.D.’s child and collaborated with the couple in filmmaking. Both H.D. and Bryher were on vision quests, and their cerebral eroticism led them to otherworldly experiences. During World War II, they held séances in London. After V-J Day was announced, H.D. had a severe breakdown, which Bryher, taking great pains, ensured she survived. As a love story born out of war and modernism, the book speaks to their struggles to escape binary gender and homophobic and white supremacist agendas, while celebrating their creative triumphs and courageous aspirations.Less
This dual biography takes on the daring task of examining how two women, who didn’t feel like women, survived as a couple, raising an illegitimate child during a period when such arrangements were frowned upon, if even recognized. When they met in 1918, H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle in 1886), had already achieved recognition as an Imagist poet, engaged in a lesbian affair, was married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and was pregnant by another. She fell in love with Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1894), who was trapped both in a female body and in the shadow of her father, Sir John Ellerman, a wealthy shipping magnate. They felt a telepathic and electric connection, bonding over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history, and a shared bodily dysphoria. Bryher introduced H.D. to cinema, psychoanalysis, and politics, herself rescuing refugees from Nazis throughout the 1930s. Bryher engaged in legal strategies to protect H.D., marrying Kenneth Macpherson, who adopted H.D.’s child and collaborated with the couple in filmmaking. Both H.D. and Bryher were on vision quests, and their cerebral eroticism led them to otherworldly experiences. During World War II, they held séances in London. After V-J Day was announced, H.D. had a severe breakdown, which Bryher, taking great pains, ensured she survived. As a love story born out of war and modernism, the book speaks to their struggles to escape binary gender and homophobic and white supremacist agendas, while celebrating their creative triumphs and courageous aspirations.
Jeffrey Sconce
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813033495
- eISBN:
- 9780813038315
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813033495.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The most prominent link between wireless and psychoanalysis, its chief avenue of conceptual exchange, was through the science of telepathy. Telepathy can be seen as the third and perhaps even ...
More
The most prominent link between wireless and psychoanalysis, its chief avenue of conceptual exchange, was through the science of telepathy. Telepathy can be seen as the third and perhaps even dominant science of occult communications intertwined with the simultaneous growth of wireless and psychoanalysis in the early years of the century. This chapter looks more closely at these telepathic exchanges, especially as this occult braiding of radio, telepathy, and psychoanalysis became more prominent in the wake of World War I. Much like the growth of Spiritualism in the wake of America's Civil War, the incalculable loss of the Great War provoked a resurgence of interest in a variety of occult phenomena. Underlying psychoanalysis, telepathy, and wireless was a shared foundation in energetic speculation about the transference of thought, an attempt to explain seemingly occult phenomena in the air and in the mind through the language of scientific naturalism.Less
The most prominent link between wireless and psychoanalysis, its chief avenue of conceptual exchange, was through the science of telepathy. Telepathy can be seen as the third and perhaps even dominant science of occult communications intertwined with the simultaneous growth of wireless and psychoanalysis in the early years of the century. This chapter looks more closely at these telepathic exchanges, especially as this occult braiding of radio, telepathy, and psychoanalysis became more prominent in the wake of World War I. Much like the growth of Spiritualism in the wake of America's Civil War, the incalculable loss of the Great War provoked a resurgence of interest in a variety of occult phenomena. Underlying psychoanalysis, telepathy, and wireless was a shared foundation in energetic speculation about the transference of thought, an attempt to explain seemingly occult phenomena in the air and in the mind through the language of scientific naturalism.
Courtenay Raia
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226635217
- eISBN:
- 9780226635491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226635491.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Rather than abandoning knowledge of a metaphysical reality, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) committed himself to vindicating its existence with empirical evidence. With the establishment of psychical ...
More
Rather than abandoning knowledge of a metaphysical reality, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) committed himself to vindicating its existence with empirical evidence. With the establishment of psychical research in 1882, Myers finally found his mature formulation for that project, one he would take into the very heart of Jean Martin Charcot’s experimental psychology. Between 1885 and 1886, the calendar of papers presented before the Société de Psychologie Physiologique showed a rising interest in telepathy, a momentum secretly orchestrated by Charles Richet with the aid of Frederic Myers. Charcot discretely pulled the plug in 1887, but not before Myers leveraged that published data into his own star turn, venturing his psychical theory of dynamic psychology. “Multiplex Personality” (October, 1886) was the platform upon which Myers would later raise the subliminal self (1892-1896), an extended model of consciousness with a distinctly romantic architecture. Psychical anomalies erupted at either end when consciousness fell either too far in or rose too far out of its ordinary neurological framework. With the subliminal self, Myers secured in the idiom of science the existential conditions he had sought for himself in faith, poetry, and philosophy, leaving behind the original map of the unconscious that would later guide Carl Jung.Less
Rather than abandoning knowledge of a metaphysical reality, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) committed himself to vindicating its existence with empirical evidence. With the establishment of psychical research in 1882, Myers finally found his mature formulation for that project, one he would take into the very heart of Jean Martin Charcot’s experimental psychology. Between 1885 and 1886, the calendar of papers presented before the Société de Psychologie Physiologique showed a rising interest in telepathy, a momentum secretly orchestrated by Charles Richet with the aid of Frederic Myers. Charcot discretely pulled the plug in 1887, but not before Myers leveraged that published data into his own star turn, venturing his psychical theory of dynamic psychology. “Multiplex Personality” (October, 1886) was the platform upon which Myers would later raise the subliminal self (1892-1896), an extended model of consciousness with a distinctly romantic architecture. Psychical anomalies erupted at either end when consciousness fell either too far in or rose too far out of its ordinary neurological framework. With the subliminal self, Myers secured in the idiom of science the existential conditions he had sought for himself in faith, poetry, and philosophy, leaving behind the original map of the unconscious that would later guide Carl Jung.
Stewart J. Brown
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- October 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198832539
- eISBN:
- 9780191871078
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198832539.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
W. T. Stead (1849–1912), newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women’s rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, was one of the best-known public figures in late Victorian and ...
More
W. T. Stead (1849–1912), newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women’s rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, was one of the best-known public figures in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This a religious biography of Stead, giving particular attention to Stead’s conception of journalism, in an age of growing mass literacy, as a means to communicate religious truth and morality, and his view of the editor’s desk as a modern pulpit from which the editor could preach to a congregation of tens of thousands. The book explores how his Nonconformist Conscience and sense of divine calling infused his newspaper crusades, most famously his ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign against child prostitution, and it considers his efforts, through forms of participatory journalism, to create a ‘union of all who love in the service of all who suffer’ and a ‘Civic Church’. The book considers his growing interest in spiritualism and the occult as he searched for the evidence of an afterlife that might draw people of an increasingly secular age back to faith. It discusses his imperialism and his belief in the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and American Republic as God’s new chosen people for the spread of civilization, and it considers how his growing understanding of other faiths and cultures, but more especially his moral revulsion over the South African War of 1899–1902, brought him to question those beliefs. Finally, it assesses the influence of religious faith on his campaigns for world peace and the arbitration of international disputes.Less
W. T. Stead (1849–1912), newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women’s rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, was one of the best-known public figures in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This a religious biography of Stead, giving particular attention to Stead’s conception of journalism, in an age of growing mass literacy, as a means to communicate religious truth and morality, and his view of the editor’s desk as a modern pulpit from which the editor could preach to a congregation of tens of thousands. The book explores how his Nonconformist Conscience and sense of divine calling infused his newspaper crusades, most famously his ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign against child prostitution, and it considers his efforts, through forms of participatory journalism, to create a ‘union of all who love in the service of all who suffer’ and a ‘Civic Church’. The book considers his growing interest in spiritualism and the occult as he searched for the evidence of an afterlife that might draw people of an increasingly secular age back to faith. It discusses his imperialism and his belief in the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and American Republic as God’s new chosen people for the spread of civilization, and it considers how his growing understanding of other faiths and cultures, but more especially his moral revulsion over the South African War of 1899–1902, brought him to question those beliefs. Finally, it assesses the influence of religious faith on his campaigns for world peace and the arbitration of international disputes.
David Leavitt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198747826
- eISBN:
- 9780191916946
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198747826.003.0042
- Subject:
- Computer Science, History of Computer Science
Of the nine arguments against the validity of the imitation game that Alan Turing anticipated and refuted in advance in his ‘Computing machinery and ...
More
Of the nine arguments against the validity of the imitation game that Alan Turing anticipated and refuted in advance in his ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, the most peculiar is probably the last, ‘The argument from extra-sensory perception’. So out of step is this argument with the rest of the paper that most writers on Turing (myself included) have tended to ignore it or gloss over it, while some editions omit it altogether.1 An investigation into the research into parapsychology that had been done in the years leading up to Turing’s breakthrough paper, however, provides some context for the argument’s inclusion, as well as some surprising insights into Turing’s mind. Argument 9 (of the nine arguments against the validity of the imitation game) begins with a statement that to many of us today will seem remarkable. Turing writes:… I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming…. To what ‘statistical evidence’ is Turing referring? In all likelihood it is the results of some experiments carried out in the early 1940s by S. G. Soal (1899–1975), a lecturer in mathematics at Queen Mary College, University of London, and a member of the London-based Society for Psychical Research (SPR). To give some background, the SPR had been founded in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers—all graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge—for the express purpose of investigating ‘that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and spiritualistic . . . in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once no less obscure nor less hotly debated’. Although the membership of the SPR included numerous academics and scientists—most notably William James, Sir William Crookes, and Lord Rayleigh, a Nobel laureate in physics—it had no academic affiliation. Indeed, in the view of their detractors, the ‘psychists’, as they were known, occupied the same fringe as the mediums and mind-readers whose claims it sought to verify—or disclaim.
Less
Of the nine arguments against the validity of the imitation game that Alan Turing anticipated and refuted in advance in his ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, the most peculiar is probably the last, ‘The argument from extra-sensory perception’. So out of step is this argument with the rest of the paper that most writers on Turing (myself included) have tended to ignore it or gloss over it, while some editions omit it altogether.1 An investigation into the research into parapsychology that had been done in the years leading up to Turing’s breakthrough paper, however, provides some context for the argument’s inclusion, as well as some surprising insights into Turing’s mind. Argument 9 (of the nine arguments against the validity of the imitation game) begins with a statement that to many of us today will seem remarkable. Turing writes:… I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming…. To what ‘statistical evidence’ is Turing referring? In all likelihood it is the results of some experiments carried out in the early 1940s by S. G. Soal (1899–1975), a lecturer in mathematics at Queen Mary College, University of London, and a member of the London-based Society for Psychical Research (SPR). To give some background, the SPR had been founded in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers—all graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge—for the express purpose of investigating ‘that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and spiritualistic . . . in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once no less obscure nor less hotly debated’. Although the membership of the SPR included numerous academics and scientists—most notably William James, Sir William Crookes, and Lord Rayleigh, a Nobel laureate in physics—it had no academic affiliation. Indeed, in the view of their detractors, the ‘psychists’, as they were known, occupied the same fringe as the mediums and mind-readers whose claims it sought to verify—or disclaim.
Simon Palfrey
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226150642
- eISBN:
- 9780226150789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226150789.003.0024
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This section looks at the duel between Edgar and Edmond, and Edgar’s attempt to summarize the moral and narrative logic of the story, as though he is living in a morality play or romance. His attempt ...
More
This section looks at the duel between Edgar and Edmond, and Edgar’s attempt to summarize the moral and narrative logic of the story, as though he is living in a morality play or romance. His attempt is at once frighteningly possible, because in part true to the severe telepathic, metaleptic logic of the playworld; and inadequate, because not feeling enough, and like the duel too indentured to positivistic, visible connections, and to a kind of poetic justice that the play shows to be absurd. Again, he wants to disown the supernal, parallel world of Tom—which is now also the world of Lear and Cordelia—and he cannot.Less
This section looks at the duel between Edgar and Edmond, and Edgar’s attempt to summarize the moral and narrative logic of the story, as though he is living in a morality play or romance. His attempt is at once frighteningly possible, because in part true to the severe telepathic, metaleptic logic of the playworld; and inadequate, because not feeling enough, and like the duel too indentured to positivistic, visible connections, and to a kind of poetic justice that the play shows to be absurd. Again, he wants to disown the supernal, parallel world of Tom—which is now also the world of Lear and Cordelia—and he cannot.
Douglas Kerr
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674947
- eISBN:
- 9780191756986
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674947.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
His Spiritualist beliefs, which his writing put into practice, compromised the high reputation Conan Doyle had achieved before the First World War. This chapter asks why he espoused them. He had soon ...
More
His Spiritualist beliefs, which his writing put into practice, compromised the high reputation Conan Doyle had achieved before the First World War. This chapter asks why he espoused them. He had soon turned away from the Church, but was active in psychical research of many kinds and gradually became convinced that the truths of Spiritualism were scientifically proved. The Land of Mist is his Spiritualist condition-of-England novel. Spiritualism was the great saving antidote to the modern poison of materialism, he believed. His notorious endorsement of the Cottingley Fairies photographs is discussed in these terms, the photos being a token, for him, of a spiritual and innocent England capable of redeeming the nation mired in materialism, selfishness and war. His last decade was spent in stubborn advocacy and practice, in print and in person, at home and around the world, of the Spiritualist vision.Less
His Spiritualist beliefs, which his writing put into practice, compromised the high reputation Conan Doyle had achieved before the First World War. This chapter asks why he espoused them. He had soon turned away from the Church, but was active in psychical research of many kinds and gradually became convinced that the truths of Spiritualism were scientifically proved. The Land of Mist is his Spiritualist condition-of-England novel. Spiritualism was the great saving antidote to the modern poison of materialism, he believed. His notorious endorsement of the Cottingley Fairies photographs is discussed in these terms, the photos being a token, for him, of a spiritual and innocent England capable of redeeming the nation mired in materialism, selfishness and war. His last decade was spent in stubborn advocacy and practice, in print and in person, at home and around the world, of the Spiritualist vision.
Jad Smith
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040634
- eISBN:
- 9780252099076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040634.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a ...
More
In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a feat Campbell had declared impossible, The Demolished Man also reimagined telepathy via sociolinguistics, thinking of it in terms of language change. Bester’s telepaths, which he calls “espers,” develop their own idioms, metaphors, and in-jokes, all of which Bester captures through nonstandard orthography, extra-coding, and other forms of innovative, modernist-style language play. This chapter also chronicles Boucher’s continuing influence on Bester’s development as a writer and examines Bester’s preoccupation with the wish fulfillment theme in short stories such as “Hobson’s Choice” and “5,271,009.”Less
In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a feat Campbell had declared impossible, The Demolished Man also reimagined telepathy via sociolinguistics, thinking of it in terms of language change. Bester’s telepaths, which he calls “espers,” develop their own idioms, metaphors, and in-jokes, all of which Bester captures through nonstandard orthography, extra-coding, and other forms of innovative, modernist-style language play. This chapter also chronicles Boucher’s continuing influence on Bester’s development as a writer and examines Bester’s preoccupation with the wish fulfillment theme in short stories such as “Hobson’s Choice” and “5,271,009.”
Leigh Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748627691
- eISBN:
- 9780748684441
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627691.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that the idea of telepathy can be seen as fundamental to a reconsideration of mimesis as it challenges the idea of distance – between original and copy, between perceiver, ...
More
This chapter argues that the idea of telepathy can be seen as fundamental to a reconsideration of mimesis as it challenges the idea of distance – between original and copy, between perceiver, perception and the object perceived. It looks at the genealogy of telepathy, via the Society of Psychical Research, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Peirce, and its imbrication with practices of visual mimesis, and sees in the work of the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov a demonstration of film's telepathic abilities.Less
This chapter argues that the idea of telepathy can be seen as fundamental to a reconsideration of mimesis as it challenges the idea of distance – between original and copy, between perceiver, perception and the object perceived. It looks at the genealogy of telepathy, via the Society of Psychical Research, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Peirce, and its imbrication with practices of visual mimesis, and sees in the work of the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov a demonstration of film's telepathic abilities.
Elizabeth Rottenberg
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284115
- eISBN:
- 9780823286065
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284115.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This chapter explores Sigmund Freud’s “conversion” to telepathy. It argues that Freud introduces the question of telepathy in order to exclude the accident from the psychical realm. The accident must ...
More
This chapter explores Sigmund Freud’s “conversion” to telepathy. It argues that Freud introduces the question of telepathy in order to exclude the accident from the psychical realm. The accident must be evacuated, this chapter argues, because it is only by isolating a domain into which external randomness no longer penetrates that psychoanalysis can claim to be a science of interpretation. And yet, as this chapter shows, the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing the science of psychoanalysis from superstition hinges on, and is determined by, chance—and Freud’s encounter with The Forsyte Saga.Less
This chapter explores Sigmund Freud’s “conversion” to telepathy. It argues that Freud introduces the question of telepathy in order to exclude the accident from the psychical realm. The accident must be evacuated, this chapter argues, because it is only by isolating a domain into which external randomness no longer penetrates that psychoanalysis can claim to be a science of interpretation. And yet, as this chapter shows, the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing the science of psychoanalysis from superstition hinges on, and is determined by, chance—and Freud’s encounter with The Forsyte Saga.
Mathieu Donner
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496816696
- eISBN:
- 9781496816733
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496816696.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
After millennia of eugenic planning, Doro’s supremacy is challenged by a young telepath named Mary in Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind. Matthieu Donner argues that Mary’s transition as described by ...
More
After millennia of eugenic planning, Doro’s supremacy is challenged by a young telepath named Mary in Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind. Matthieu Donner argues that Mary’s transition as described by Butler reframes adolescence as an ethical awakening, a violent rupture that transitions from singularity to plurality, solipsism to interdependence, boundaried to vulnerable. Mary is able to network with other telepaths, training them and centering them, accomplishing quickly and sensitively what Doro failed to do—establish a community of telepaths who are free from societal interference. Butler’s ideas are understandably fraught with contradictions, but nevertheless revolutionary.Less
After millennia of eugenic planning, Doro’s supremacy is challenged by a young telepath named Mary in Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind. Matthieu Donner argues that Mary’s transition as described by Butler reframes adolescence as an ethical awakening, a violent rupture that transitions from singularity to plurality, solipsism to interdependence, boundaried to vulnerable. Mary is able to network with other telepaths, training them and centering them, accomplishing quickly and sensitively what Doro failed to do—establish a community of telepaths who are free from societal interference. Butler’s ideas are understandably fraught with contradictions, but nevertheless revolutionary.
Kent Cartwright
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- November 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198868897
- eISBN:
- 9780191905346
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198868897.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this ...
More
Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this motif in the comedies or the way that it figures in their ongoing actions as well as their endings. Among other values, return from the dead showcases the efficacy of desire on the part of those bereft and the sense of radiant new life that the revenant sometimes acquires. While this motif is usually oriented towards Shakespeare’s late romances, such as Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, it is strikingly pervasive, influential, and mysterious in the earlier comedies, as suggested by revenant characters ranging from Two Gentlemen’s Julia to All’s Well’s Helen. The chapter draws examples extensively from the comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. The motif lends uncanny power, emotional and intellectual depth, and memorability to Shakespearean comedy. It likewise helps us understand the persistence of medieval values into the early modern period.Less
Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this motif in the comedies or the way that it figures in their ongoing actions as well as their endings. Among other values, return from the dead showcases the efficacy of desire on the part of those bereft and the sense of radiant new life that the revenant sometimes acquires. While this motif is usually oriented towards Shakespeare’s late romances, such as Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, it is strikingly pervasive, influential, and mysterious in the earlier comedies, as suggested by revenant characters ranging from Two Gentlemen’s Julia to All’s Well’s Helen. The chapter draws examples extensively from the comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. The motif lends uncanny power, emotional and intellectual depth, and memorability to Shakespearean comedy. It likewise helps us understand the persistence of medieval values into the early modern period.