Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

by Avery F. Gordon

Book Overview

"Avery Gordon's stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. " -George Lipsitz

"The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny." -American Studies International

"Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816654468
• ISBN13: 9780816654468
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

fast shipping. great condition!

this book arrived in great shape, like new, and very quickly! would purchase from this seller again.

A brilliant conceptual piece redefining the supernatural

Quibble (as many well) with the specifics of particular examples, or the choice of them, Gordon's crucial conceptual leap is to explain the supernatural in terms of the psychology of anxiety, hallucination, and ultimately, religion and myth. Her work adds a critical, and unifying, piece to the work of Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud and others which ultimately go to the underlying workings of the human mind and the bases of consciousness.

This is a (hauntingly) beautiful and useful book.

I find Ghostly Matters a brilliant, useful, and (hauntingly) beautiful book. I especially appreciate the way Gordon brings together ostensibly disparate approaches and subjects (sociology and literary studies, the material and the spiritual, Argentina's "disappeared" and slavery in the U.S., and different kinds of writing in her own text) to call into question our conventional ways of seeing, to bring back those whom History and "just the Facts, ma'am" have tried to bury or relegate to permanent shadow. I'm going to give this book as a holiday present to everyone I love who hasn't read it already.