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Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

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Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

By: Avery F. Gordon  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Description:

“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 of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

 

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

 

Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.



Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
fast shipping. great condition! - this book arrived in great shape, like new, and very quickly! would purchase from this seller again.

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Wordy and overrated - This book is meant for an upper level college student or a graduate student education. It is not about ghosts as much as it is about how the correlation between memories and photographs are types of ghostly experiences, haunting experiences of our own pasts. It is wordy and pretentious. The writer says in an entire chapter which anyone could say in two to three paragraphs. The more she writes the more circles she draws around her points and the less clear he point becomes. Unless you are a psychology major or you want to waste your free time.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
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.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
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.

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