The emptiness of the space which he had expected to see occupied, was appalling, and he shrank down, sick and dizzy with the baffling
apparitional past that thus vexed his consciousness.
He summoned them before him in
apparitional procession: Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr.
People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the
apparitional world, an incalculable terror?
Terry Castle's The
Apparitional Lesbian(7) is just about my favourite book of lesbian criticism because she shares many of my views as opposed to many of the other people doing lesbian criticism these days.
5 For a discussion of this scene as an example of cross-dressed masquerade, a virtual convention in the homoerotic girls' school novel, see Terry Castle, The
Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia Univ.
On the one hand, it is not a way so certain as not to mistake the
apparitional manifold of the sophist's art for the sophist's art, and as not to get the sophist's art right only on the second try, and even then at the high price of bewilderment before the problem of nonbeing, which the Stranger had not recognized when he noticed the resemblance of the sophist to the angler.
The systematic study of spontaneous cases--such as reports of psi experiences and poltergeists; the problem of the survival of the human personality after the death of the physical body in the form of memories of past lives by children; spirit identification employing sophisticated codification of messages;
apparitional encounters, the investigation of anomalous experiences which for centuries have traditionally been the patrimony of occultism, spiritism, and folklore ("astral trips," luck, detection at a distance, healing by faith, psychic reading); and the therapeutic treatment of traumatic anomalous experiences--all show the creativity in the designs of the parapsychologists, often surpassing what one encounters in other social sciences.
Everything
apparitional, spectral, whether confined to earthly or released to transcendental experiences is fashioned out of the grotesque.
Bersani (Homos) and Terry Castle (The
Apparitional Lesbian) were among those who feared that queer theory's pluralism diluted the specificity of gay and lesbian sexuality.
It is the second option that is borne out in the extraordinary obtrusion of ghostly hauntings in Wordsworth's poetry, quite different and differently weighted than in the earlier Gothic conventions and more akin to the about-to-come intense interest in
apparitional figures in Carlyle's work or in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities or indeed in the writings of Marx himself.
7) Terry Castle, in The
Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), notes that 'The law has traditionally ignored female homosexuality', and that members of the House of Lords, when they had the opportunity in 1921 to amend the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 to include 'acts of gross indecency' between women, did not do so (p.
That
apparitional visitor's knock upon the poet's chamber door would spark the brilliant, bewildering seven-year epic comedy of Gun: slinger, a work credited by Dorn's fellow poet Robert Duncan as a major breakthrough from "the poetry of process or organism" to a new genre-bending mixed-media poetry having "to do with scenario and masque" and driven by the verbal devices of "a screen-narrative voice that takes off as a movie scenario [in] the Western, Marx Brothers style," The project would develop the polyphonic narrative technique Dorn had tentatively experimented with in "Box Score" into a creation of another scale altogether, one that would bring him temporary fame and be proclaimed by novelist Thomas McGuane "a fundamental American masterpiece.
