PowerPointPrsentation

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Theorie und Geschichte der Medien(kultur) vom 19.
Jahrhundert bis Nine-Eleven
Andere Medien(begriffe)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 1864)
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
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• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64)
• Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
• Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)
• American Renaissance
• novel ? romance
• The Scarlet Letter (Der scharlachrote Buchstabe)
  (1850)
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
• The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• The Marble Faun (1861)
• Spiritistischer Medienbegriff

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Franz Anton Mesmer 1734-1814
Animalischer Magnetismus universales Fluidum
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Blithedale Romance Miles Coverdale (unreliable
narrator) wonderful exhibition of the Veiled
Lady for the benefit of such my readers as are
unacquainted with her now forgotten celebrity,
that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric line
one of the earliest that had indicated the birth
of a new science, or the revival of an old
humbug (5) Now-a-days, in the management of his
subject, clairvoyant, or medium, the
exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of
scientific experiment and even if he profess to
tread a step or two across the boundaries of the
spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of
our actual life, and extends them over his
preternatural conquests (5 f.)
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rhetoric of mesmerism (Maria Tatar, Spellbound,
1978) From a moral and philosophical
perspective, Hawthorne thoroughly despised the
pseudosciences of mesmerism and spiritualism that
erupted in American culture in the 1840s and
1850s. As Hawthorne saw it, mesmerists or
hypnotists, by placing their mediums or subjects
in a trance, could demonically possess and
control them. In so doing they violated the
individual soul and substituted their own will
for that of their victims. ... As a writer of
what he called romances, he often saw himself as
kind of mesmerist ... in which he used the very
forces he himself morally opposed to describe and
produce the techniques and strategies of his art
(S. Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne, S.
3) Handlungspersonal v.a. Coverdale Mr.
Moodie/Fauntleroy Hollingsworth Zenobia -
Priscilla
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Geschichte in der Geschichte (1) The Silvery
Veil Westervelt approached the window, ...
displaying the sort of smile on his handsome
features which, when I before met him, had let me
into the secret of his gold-bordered teeth. ...
This man, as I had soon reason to know, was
endowed with a cat-like circumspection and
though precisely the most unspiritual quality in
the world, it was almost as effective as
spiritual insight, in making him acquainted with
whatever it suited him to discover. He now proved
it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting
and recognizing me, at my post of observation
(158) Geschichte in der Geschichte (2) Old
Moodies past arrangements with those whom he
had attempted to wrong-a mere image, an optical
illusion who would gladly have faded out of
view, and have crept about invisibly (183 f.)
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Geschichte in der Geschichte (2) Old Moodies
past strange child she sometimes talked of
distant places and splendid rooms, as if she had
just left them. Hidden things were visible to
her, ... and silence was audible. strange
gentleman/wizard had taken advantage of
Priscillas lack of earthly substance to subject
her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through
whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever
happened, in regions near or remote
(188) ____________________________________________
_______ As I write it, the reader will
charitably suppose me to blush, and turn away my
face - I - I myself was in love with
Priscilla! (247) doofe, langweilige Geschichte
(?) I have made but a poor and dim figure in my
own narrative. But what, after all, have I to
tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing! (245)
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• psychisches Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zwischen zwei
  Personen,
• Exemplarisch dafür die spirit(ual)istische Szene
  in den Aufführungen vor Publikum
• A Village Hall
• Conjecture
• Fauntleroys Verbrechen
• It was just the sort of crime, growing out of
  its artificial state, which society ... neither
  could nor ought to pardon
• Trickbetrug ?
• Priscilla und ihr Vater
• I was convinced that this pretty sight must have
  been purposely arranged by Priscilla, for the old
  man to see (88)
• a silk purse - a symbol of Priscillas own
  mystery (35)
• Prostitution ?
• Psychoanalyse als Deutungsmuster (
  Naturwissenschaft)

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• 27 Thesen in der (abgelehnten)
  Dissertationsschrift
• There exists a mutual influence between the
  Heavenly Bodies, the Earth and the Animate
  Bodies
• - A universally distributed and continuous fluid
  which by its nature is capable of receiving,
  propagating and communicating all the impressions
  of movement, is the means of this influence
• -The property of the animal body which brings it
  under the influence of the heavenly bodies, and
  the reciprocal action occuring among those who
  are surrounded by it, shown by its analogy with
  the Magnet, induced me to term it Animal
  Magnetism
• The action and properties of Animal Magnetism,
  thus defined, can be communicated to other
  animate and inanimate bodies. Both are more or
  less susceptible to it
• (Mesmer, Dissertation on the Discovery of
  Animal Magnetism 67 f.)

Franz Anton Mesmer 1734-1814
Animalischer Magnetismus universales Fluidum
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Baquet
Großrechner/Server
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He described (in a strange, philosophical guise,
with terms of art, as if it were a matter of
chemical discovery) the agency by which this
mighty result was to be effected nor would it
have sursprised me, had he pretended to hold up a
portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he
affirmed it to be, in a glass phial (200) By
the agency of which I have just spoken, she is,
at this moment, in communion with the spiritual
world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an
enchantment, having been dipt, as it were, and
essentially imbued, through the potency of my
art, with the fluid medium of spirits (201)
Phiole
Silvery veil
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Ent-spiritualisiert, ist das Medium das Endgerät
oder terminal. Auf Mesmers ureigene
naturwissenschaftliche Begrifflichkeit
zurückgeführt, ist das universale Fluidum die
Gesamtheit der Netzwerke, die in der materiellen
Form von Drähten oder auch kabellos die Welt
umspannen. Schließlich entspricht der silberne
Schleier in seiner Materialität
Hightech-Serverprozessoren aus Silikon und
Mikrochips. Ihn zu erfinden und zum Laufen zu
bringen, darin besteht die Essenz des
Computergenies, die Hawthorne darstellt als
geheimnisvolles und hyperpotentes Destillat in
einer Phiole He spoke of a new era that was
dawning upon the world an era that would link
soul to soul, and the present life to what we
call futurity, with a closeness that should
finally convert both worlds into one great,
mutually conscious brotherhood (200)