Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant conceptual piece redefining the supernatural
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: This is a (hauntingly) beautiful and useful book.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: deserves more than 5!
Review: i was blown away by avery gordon's book. i love her notion of haunting, that everything is "haunted" by the specter of something, that theorizing and analyzing what isn't readily apparent is as critical as examining what is apparent. gordon deploys literature to discuss haunting (and beautifully discusses toni morrison's work). this is an incredibly powerful text.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant conceptual piece redefining the supernatural
Review: 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.