The paranormal makes believers and unbelievers out of us all. The compulsion to debunk that which we can neither see nor easily account for is always a part of the game that we play. Spending some time with these two books on the subject, I have developed an appreciation for the constitutive nature of the dialectic between believer and skeptic.
Both Haunted by Leo Braudy and Credulity by Emily Ogden look at the paranormal as it relates to the project of Enlightenment. Theoretically, this period saw the advancement of scientific knowledge and democratic political discourses, each, in time, marking the end of provincial superstitions across the West. However, as Braudy and Ogden make clear, the old ways of seeing the world have not gone anywhere. In Ogden, we get this story as it plays out on American soil: a place that seems, in her care, both near and far from...
