Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (review)

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer "Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (review)"Comparative Literature Studies - Volume 40, Number 4, 2003, pp. 450-452 Penn State University Press

Excerpt
This book adds a new dimension to our knowledge of occultism and magical thinking (thinking that collapses time and space) in late 19th and early 20th century England. The author argues that deep-seated anxieties about gender and sexuality intersected with new distance-annihilating technologies and occult beliefs, holding out the promise of previously unimaginable contacts between people and fostering new ways of imagining intimacy that transgressed traditional boundaries of gender and class, and that even allowed the living to speak with the dead. Magical thinking was reflected in the literature of the period and helped spawn the new disciplines of psychical research (the scientific study of the occult) and psychoanalysis.
The Society for Psychical Research, formed in 1882, sponsored experiments in telepathy (a word coined that year) designed to find out how it worked. That the phenomenon existed was taken for granted. Telepathy inspired visions of instant communication, many of them erotically charged, and of utopias in which the "rich would have to think about the poor and the poor could telepathically share the privileges of the rich" (25). Mark Twain, Thomas Alva Edison, Rudyard Kipling (whose sister was a medium!), Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud were all interested in psychical research. The...