Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
This paper examines the use of ghosts in three pieces of post-Civil War American literature, namely, Herman Melville's Clarel, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Robert Frost's "Ghost House." Specifically, I use Srdjan Smajic's critical theories on ghosts to formally analyze how these authors use aspects of ghost-seeing to critique science's dependence on empirical evidence. I find that ghosts in these pieces of literature serve as a tool to question the maxim, "seeing is believing," showing that empirical evidence should not overshadow faith.
Copyright and Licensing of My Content
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Location
4186 JFSB
Start Date
19-3-2015 1:15 PM
End Date
19-3-2015 2:45 PM
Included in
Seeing and Not Believing: A Critique of Post-Civil War America’s Loss of Faith Through a Spectral Medium
4186 JFSB
This paper examines the use of ghosts in three pieces of post-Civil War American literature, namely, Herman Melville's Clarel, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Robert Frost's "Ghost House." Specifically, I use Srdjan Smajic's critical theories on ghosts to formally analyze how these authors use aspects of ghost-seeing to critique science's dependence on empirical evidence. I find that ghosts in these pieces of literature serve as a tool to question the maxim, "seeing is believing," showing that empirical evidence should not overshadow faith.