Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
DOI 10.1215/00104124-3327612 Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media. By Stefan Andriopoulos. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2013. 256 p. While not among the Gothic novels discussed by Stefan Andriopoulos, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is worth considering in terms of a critical reception that has seen Shelley's novel not as Gothic but as science fiction. Shelly adapted Galvani's experiments with electrical animation of frog legs and the resulting hypothesis of "animal electricity" to give credibility to Victor Frankenstein's project to bring to life a creature assembled from dead body parts. Andriopoulos's thesis is that developments in technology and science provided the preconditions for not only emerging optical media but also German Idealism and the Gothic novel. Andriopoulos launches his argument by citing the "spiritual shapes" (Gestalten des Geistes) postulated by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as successive forms of mental progress (9). Hegel appropriated the contemporary phantasmagoria featuring ghostly projections of a laterna magica as a metaphor for these mental states, and he was not alone in making connections between mental constructions and phantasmagoria (5155). Andriopoulos calls attention to corresponding references in Kant and Schopenhauer. In perceptual and cognitive apprehension Kantian
Comparative Literature – Duke University Press
Published: Dec 1, 2015
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.