The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890

Antebellum mesmerism posed a challenge to the prerogatives of self-mastering reason from within the scientific tradition itself. Though mesmerism is now most familiar as the sensational stage-practice and quack cure that drew criticism from Hawthorne and Henry James, its sympathizers considered it a theory of sensory error. Mesmerists claimed that the trance replicated the physiological effects of deception, allowing them to study swindling in laboratory conditions. Concluding that sensory error was ineradicable, they refuted Lockean pedagogy\u27s claims to reform the errant senses. One could at best manage delusion, through the self-doubt that liberalism had enjoined only its marginalized types—credulous women, laborers, racial inferiors—to practice. Mesmerism transvalued these figures, praising their powers of self-suspicion and condemning the ridiculous confidence of reason. Tracing the American mesmeric tradition from the science\u27s first appearance there as a falsehood, in 1784; through its limited practice in the 1790s; to its extensive popularity from the 1840s to the end of the century, I find in its performances an alternate sensory public capable of including among its knowing subjects hysterics, renegades, and castaways. Rather than thinking of American publics as being formed through agreement on the procedures of reason, then, my project proposes that we see them as forming around the procedures of sensation that mesmerism discloses. Through readings of The Coquette (1797), Edgar Huntly (1799), Moby-Dick (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1853), and other works of fiction, I argue that this tradition constitutes a resource for the novel in holding open the gates of the public sphere to a pluralistic range of knowledge-producers. Forming oxymoronic crosses between good liberals and strange, errant, but insightful mesmeric knowers, American fiction creates stereoscopic images of impossible subjects

On the Identification of Emotions and Authors' Gender in Facebook Comments on the Basis of their Writing Style

[EN] In this paper, we propose a method for automatic identifying emotions in written texts in social media with high proliferation such as Facebook. For that task we try to model the way people use the language to express themselves, and also use this model for identifying the gender of the authors. We focused on Spanish due to the lack of studies and resources in that language.The work of the first author was partially funded by Autoritas Consulting SA and by Ministerio de Econom´ıa de Espa˜na under grant ECOPORTUNITY IPT-2012-1220-430000. The work of the second author was carried out in the framework of the WIQ-EI IRSES project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie, the DIANA APPLICATIONS Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts: Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) project and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Rangel, F.; Rosso, P. (2013). On the Identification of Emotions and Authors' Gender in Facebook Comments on the Basis of their Writing Style. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 1096:34-46. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/38110S3446109

Cunningly Sweated: Creation, Memory, and Time in Faulkner\u27s Mosquitoes

This study focuses on the early fiction of William Faulkner, particularly Mosquitoes. Understood in critical context, this novel suffers from retrospective bias. That is, I believe that the brilliant work that immediately (and continually) succeeded this novel provided a critical comparison that made it impossible to ascribe the appropriate value that this second novel truly deserves. Mosquitoes was not only a necessary portal and stepping stone to his later/greater fiction, but it also stands on its own as a brilliant experiment allowing Faulkner to free himself from bonds of fragmented mimesis by submerging himself in his own social, literary, theological, and psychological influences, both past and present. Faulkner created a balance between the tension he felt of a traditional Christianity that was deeply ingrained into his southern psyche and a modern influence that consisted of Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, and others. Although Mosquitoes is now often considered Faulkner’s weakest work, I argue that it is a coherent statement about the South, the past, and important human values, human values that find their origins in the rich religious soil of southern Christianity. Mosquitoes is more than a necessary step toward Faulkner’s later success; it is a literary philosophical leap into genius

Relire T. Lobsang Rampa : analyse d'un mythe moderne

Tableau d’honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2010-2011Jusqu'à ce jour, les spécialistes qui se sont prononcés sur l'oeuvre de Rampa s'entendent unanimement pour la décrire comme une imposture, un tissu de mensonges et de semi-vérités. Leur jugement s'appuie généralement sur des considérations propres au domaine de la tibétologie. Est-il possible de poser un regard différent sur cet auteur controversé, un regard qui ne soit pas celui de la tibétologie, mais celui des sciences des religions en général et de la mythologie en particulier? De ce nouveau point de vue, en dépassant les condamnations à l'emporte-pièce, l'oeuvre de Rampa ne témoigne-t-elle pas de mythes annonciateurs d'une nouvelle spiritualité

Early science fiction and occultism

This dissertation examines engagements between early science fiction (SF) and the body of modern esoteric theories and practices often described as ‘occultism’. SF is often seen as an imaginative extension of secular, empiricist science — the cultural form furthest from magic and occult logic — but this research shows that science fiction shares many of the motivations and perspectives of occultism. It argues that SF developed some of its central tropes and stylistics from its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century engagement with magical, mesmerist, Spiritualist, and Theosophical currents, particularly their attempts to legitimate the paranormal and supernatural by appealing to scientific discourse, methodology, and social authority. It also examines a reciprocal phenomenon of influence in which SF’s tropes, themes, and imagined worlds have been enfolded into occult traditions and other alternative religious movements. Finally, this dissertation assesses how SF and occultism have been conjointly deployed to defend and communicate marginal scientific theories and religious systems. This project develops a framework for analysing these intersections. It starts with case studies of three authors — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, and Marie Corelli — each of whom generated SF from earnest communication and exploration of occult scientific hypotheses in fiction. Each case study illustrates areas of intersection in which occultism and SF influenced each other’s development, including a mutual affectation of scientific verisimilitude, naturalisation of the supernatural, a preference for hypothesis over fact, and projection of unknown forces and powers into the future. The final chapter expands scope to consider the network of occult and science fictional engagement from 1860 to 1926, illustrating further areas of intersection including an instinct for re-enchantment and a mediation of binaries constructed along the lines of science versus religion. Finally, it examines the esoteric heritage of several key tropes of science fiction: psionic powers, space exploration, and the extra-terrestrial

Eye to I

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2007."September 2007."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-51).This is the story of the language of eyes - what they say about our emotions, what they reveal about our intentions, how they interact with our face, and how they connect us to one another. The story follows our experience with eyes from infancy when we first learn to connect looking with knowing. This connection forms the foundation of our social understanding and has evolutionary implications. From there the story moves to gaze in love, and other social encounters. I look at the role of eye gaze in the judgments we make about others - the way in which direct eye contact may affect how likable or attractive we find another person. I then turn to these questions: how much of an eye does it take for us to feel watched? Do pictures of eyes affect us? What about the eyes of a robot - do we respond to them as we do to human eyes? I show that for those who have normally functioning eyes, attention to the eye region plays a critical role in how we learn about the social world and our place in it.by Ada Brunstein.S.M.in Science Writin

Meaning refinement to improve cross-lingual information retrieval

Magdeburg, Univ., Fak. für Informatik, Diss., 2012von Farag Ahme

Bibliography of Occult and Fantastic Beliefs vol.3: L - R

Neuss: Bruno Buike EDITORS 2017, 278 p. - E29 - fake author / pseudonym "Paul Smith", SOMEWHERE perhaps Melbourne University, Australi

Empowering passivity in H.D.’s Madrigal cycle novels

My thesis re-situates the work of modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (H.D., 1886–1961) at the intersection of modernism, psychoanalysis, spirituality and passivity. Although H.D. is often claimed to be a feminist writer, there are very few active expressions of feminist anger in her work. Instead, we might turn to psychoanalytic discussions to consider where the anger resides in H.D. Melanie Klein argues that aggression is an innate instinct and art is a means of sublimating that instinct. For H.D, a bisexual mother who experiences war trauma, betrayal, death, stillbirth and breakdown, aggression and anger become a form of artistic energy that allows her to create herself anew. In a sense, her pain and suffering are transformed into an embedded anger that later becomes H.D.’s catalyst to write. I argue that not writing in explicit anger was a deliberate choice, for H.D. yearned to destroy the dichotomies she faced, not to reverse them. To do this, and still reflect her anger, she adopts an unusual passive-aggressive writing strategy. Though passivity might seem like a negative rather than a positive trait to feminist readers, I seek to demonstrate that H.D. manages to extract power from passivity. I explore through Kleinian psychoanalysis the ways in which H.D.’s writing relates to power and passivity and, importantly, to H.D.’s Moravian ancestors, who were, simultaneously, ‘gladly passive’ and powerful. Whilst appearing passive, these narrative strategies also hold the power that H.D. values. As such, Moravian ways of dealing with aggression contribute to the passive-aggressive writing methods that H.D. adopts, such as the roman à clef and palimpsest. In subsequent chapters on Asphodel and Hermione, I reflect on how these two novels represent a place for her to emerge as a powerful voice