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Ideology and Futurology in Early 20th-Century Britain: Wells, Haldane, Bernal, and Their Critics

Peter J. Bowler

in Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century

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

Voices Carry: Film and Telepathy

Ned Schantz

in Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and 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

Gilbert Murray and Psychic Research

N. J. Lowe

in Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics

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

Traces of an Accusing Spirit: Mary Hays and the Vehicular State

Mary Jacobus

in Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading

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

The Paranormal

DAVID J. BARTHOLOMEW

in Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational to be a Christian?

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

Telepathy

Peter Szendy

in Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies

Theories of piano playing like Marie Jaëll’s join Freud’s considerations on telepathy or Benjamin’s on innervation as action at a distance.

Wireless Ego: The Pulp Physics of Psychoanalysis

Jeffrey Sconce

in Broadcasting Modernism

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 Incandescent Solid beneath Our Line of Sight”: Frederic Myers, the Self, and the Psychiatric Subconscious

Courtenay Raia

in The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siécle

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

Turing and the paranormal

David Leavitt

in The Turing Guide

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

Scene 11 Dark Places

Simon Palfrey

in Poor Tom: Living "King Lear"

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

Spirit

Douglas Kerr

in Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice

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

The Eureka Years

Jad Smith

in Alfred Bester

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

‘Here is Where the Magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film

Leigh Wilson

in Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult

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

What Are the Chances? Psychoanalysis and Telepathy: (Foreign Bodies II)

Elizabeth Rottenberg

in For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida

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

“Open to Me. Maybe I Can Help”: Networked Consciousness and Ethical Subjectivity in Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind

Mathieu Donner

in Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World

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

The Return from the Dead

Kent Cartwright

in Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

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