The ghost and the corpse: figuring the mind/brain complex at the turn of the twentieth century.
2010-12
Loading...
View/Download File
Persistent link to this item
Statistics
View StatisticsJournal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Title
The ghost and the corpse: figuring the mind/brain complex at the turn of the twentieth century.
Authors
Published Date
2010-12
Publisher
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
Abstract
My dissertation investigates how debates about the relationship of the mind and the brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are refracted through literature and early cinema. I engage select literary texts and films of the period--including the private letters and public fictions of Henry James, the psychology of William James, the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, the correspondence and case studies of Sigmund Freud, the films of the Edison Film Company, and the novels of Edward Bellamy--in order to demonstrate how concerns about the limits of the human body correspond with concerns about the limits of the text and the frame. Each of my chapters addresses the "afterlife" of posthumous interpretation--how individual subjects become objects of study, how individual bodies give way to literary archives, psychological cases, and film stock. I contend that the competing diagnostic practices of psychology and neurology model competing modes of seeing and reading and that the figures of the ghost and the corpse--the representative bodies of psychic and anatomical space--emerge as metaphors for the material and immaterial detritus of works of art.
Keywords
Description
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. December 2010. Major: English. Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 237 pages.
Related to
Replaces
License
Collections
Series/Report Number
Funding information
Isbn identifier
Doi identifier
Previously Published Citation
Suggested citation
Kamerbeek, Christopher. (2010). The ghost and the corpse: figuring the mind/brain complex at the turn of the twentieth century.. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/100164.
Content distributed via the University Digital Conservancy may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor. By using these files, users agree to the Terms of Use. Materials in the UDC may contain content that is disturbing and/or harmful. For more information, please see our statement on harmful content in digital repositories.