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"Hypnotism Fiction."
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Cadaverous Intimacies: Disgust, Desire, and the Corpse in Edgar Allan Poe's “Valdemar”
According to Person, these experiences are answered by violent refusals, denial, and repression.[...]Poe's fiction registers \"the inception of a powerful homophobia in the middle of the nineteenth century.According to Daniel Kelly, it has \"the ability to infect other items with its offensiv eness; it can pass on its disgustingness and contaminate otherwise pure and undisgusting entities.In other words, the more Valdemar embodies death, the closer P gets to a complete, embodied intimacy with him.[...]it's more accurate to read P as scientist, medical practitioner, and mesmerist.Since its inception, mesmerism has been a \"system of healing\" used to treat a seemingly infinite range of illnesses, including respiratory disorders, headaches, injury, hysteria, convulsions, and so on (Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 109, 110-13).
Journal Article
Pirate mom
When a hypnotist convinces Pete's mother that she is a pirate, Pete tries to find a way to turn her back into a regular parent.
Book
Mesmer's Demon: Fiction, Falsehood, and the Mechanical Imagination
In the final weeks of the year 1784, Joseph Johnson's London publishing house came out with a translation (Report) of a French treatise (Rapport des commissaires) debunking a highly popular medical treatment: animal magnetism, or \"mesmerism,\" the science of directing an invisible fluid into the body to cure disease. Under the Lockean conspectus, thrall to the mechanical imagination marked those excluded from the comity of rational knowers-types against which enlightenment defined itself.7 Hysterics, religious fanatics, seduction victims, and mesmeric patients fell short of the threshold of respectable subjectivity in that their mechanical bodies, not their rational minds, manned the controls.\\n Such a self-narrating character is more than a shadowy anima or demon: she is a subject with manners and preferences; a deliberator with a degree of self-awareness.
Journal Article
Sweet heart
\"After Charley and her husband Tom move into Elmwood Mill, sinister memories of a previous existence start to haunt her. Despite both their attempts to dismiss everything with rational explanations, the feeling turns to certainty as the memories become increasingly vivid and terrifying\"--Publisher marketing.
Book
Tales of Hypnotic Crime
This chapter analyzes competing late nineteenth-century medical theories of “suggestion” to establish the constitutive role of literary fiction for the lively scientific debate about hypnotic crimes. Whereas Jean-Martin Charcot and his disciples denied the possibility of so-called criminal suggestions, the physicians of the Nancy school substituted literary stories for actual cases within their treatises about hypnotism and crime. At the same time, narratives and novels such as Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla or Gregor Samarow's Under a Foreign Will cited the forensic debate about the irresistible power of suggestion, thereby imbuing the literary description of possessed bodies with scientific legitimacy. The enormously popular tales of hypnotic crime accordingly emerged from a mutual exchange of rhetorical tropes, scientific concepts, and narrative patterns among law, literature, and medicine. Juridical, literary, and medical representations of criminal suggestion mutually presupposed and engendered each other.
Book Chapter
Invisible Corporate Bodies
This chapter analyzes the late nineteenth-century juridical debate about the demonic power of invisible corporate bodies. The strain of continental legal theory based on a modernization of Roman law expressly relied on fictional modes of representation, thereby compensating for the “theoretical deficiency” of juridical discourse in conceptualizing legal persons. But a merely “fictional person” was not considered capable of committing crimes. In diametrical contrast, other legal theorists such as von Gierke and von Liszt regarded the corporation as an invisible yet real organism that could compel its possessed members to commit criminal acts. This connection between theories of corporate agency and hypnotism was not, however, one of monocausal determination. Instead, the legal representations of intangible corporate organisms participated in a discursive network of the fantastic that also included contemporary literary texts such as Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Juridical invocations of invisible corporate bodies and their seemingly preternatural demonic power thus testified to a precarious proximity of legal theory and horror fiction.
Book Chapter