MDDM Ch. 16 Questions, Comments

[Dave Monroe]

Now, really, as always, happy to do so, but there are
reasons I go to the trouble to key up this stuff for
y'all ....

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> 171-2 Interesting passage:
> 
>     She occupies now an entirely new angular
> relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the
> Living, to act on behalf of Death or its evr'yday
> Coercions,-- Wages too low to live upon. Laws
> written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison,
> Death's Thousand Metaphors in the World,-- as if,
> the instant of her passing over having acted as a
> Lens, the Rays of her Soul have undergone moral
> Refraction.
> 
> Is Rebekah perhaps the spur, or creation, of Mason's
> "moral" conscience?

>From Terry Castle, "Spectral Politics: Apparition
Belief and the Romantic Imagination," The Female
Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of
the Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. 168-89
...

"We might take Daniel Defoe's Essay on the History
and Reality of Apparitions (1727) as an interesting
transitional work ..." (p. 175)

   "For Defoe, some false apparitions are merely the
'Vapour of the Brain, a sick delirious fume of Smoke
in the Hypochondria; forming it self in such and such
Figure to the Eye-sight of the Mind ... which all
look'd upon with a calm Revision, would appear, as it
really is, nothing but a Nothing, a Skeleton of the
Brain, a Whymsy, and no more' ....  But other supposed
ghosts come about for more compelling reasons.  He
posits a phantom-producing faculty within the brain, a
psychic mechanism which (as Nietzsche would later) he
labels the 'Conscience.'" (p. 177)

And so forth.  For example.  Did accidentally post all
this and then some a coupla times here already,
oughtta be in yr inbox(es), Digest(s), albeit not
quite yet in the archives, maybe.  And I'm always such
a gracious host ...


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