From the Publisher
“Probing at the roots of modern thought and modern media with both scholarly rigor and originality, Andriopoulos uncovers the phantasmagoria of images that haunt the formation of the modern imagination. The ghostly reveals itself as less the realm of ancient superstition and folklore than the seedbed of a new intellectual, artistic, and technological world in which the visible and the material can diverge, and the power of ideas and visual media seem to mime the uncanny effects of apparitions. This is an exciting, and occasionally startling, work of cultural history.”— Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago“Focusing on intersections of new media technologies, philosophy, and literature, this book throws an entirely new and utterly fascinating light on the emergence of German idealism. Lucidly and forcefully argued, it provides us with a media archeology that connects the cultural background of Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Schopenhauer’s thought with discussions of optical instruments and occultism as well as with Romanticism and the Gothic novel. Andriopoulos thereby changes the way in which we read the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, producing an intricate picture of material practices, new media, philosophical theory, and poetic styles.”— Niklaus Largier, Sidney and Margaret Ancker Chair in the Humanities, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
