Editor’s Note

This special issue of Pacific Coast Philology is a collaborative production, and I would like to thank PCP editors Roswitha Burwick and Friederike von Schwerin-High as well as Craig Svonkin, executive director of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, for their sage counsel and editorial advice. I am also grateful to Heidi Schlipphacke, who organized a timely and provocative forum, “The Uncanny Art of Reading,” for the 2014 conference; the essays from the forum appear in this special issue. Julie Lambert and Astrid Meyer at Penn State University Press provided many prompt and helpful responses to numerous questions throughout the editorial process. I appreciate the editors’ suggestion that I include my own presidential address, “‘A Coterie of Spiritualists and Free Thinkers’—Spectral Riverside,” in this issue. The modest break with convention has made for a cohesive set of essays animated by the geist of the 2014 PAMLA “Familiar Spirits” themed conference.

In my address, I argue that Riverside is a particularly appropriate venue for our gathering of scholars. Elmer Wallace Holmes, in his History of Riverside County (1912), writes, “In the first years of the colony [the 1870s], there came to settle here a coterie of spiritualists and free thinkers, rather clannish in their ways, all of whom have long since passed away, leaving no descendants here to take pride in the beautiful city whose building they helped to create.” Applauding Holmes’s pithy description of early Riversiders such as Eliza Lovell Tibbets and Annie Denton Cridge, I depart from his pronouncement on their disappearance. For over a century, the city has persisted as a site of countercultural spiritualism, one that Jacques Derrida consecrated with his “Specters of Marx” talk delivered at UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society in 1993. Each of the articles published in this issue of PCP demonstrates the ways in which the 112th PAMLA conference—with its impressive range of papers on ghosts, spiritualism, the Gothic, magic, and the uncanny—has joined Riverside’s open-ended “hauntology.”

Our “Familiar Spirits” issue gets underway with “The Uncanny Art of Reading,” the 2014 PAMLA conference Forum comprised of four pieces: Kate Thomas’s “Eternal Gardens and the Queer Uncanny in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘In the Closed Room’ (1902)”; Imke Myers’s “Bourgeois Innocence Lost: Uncanny Children in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna”; and Sangita Gopal’s “Some Brief Reflections on Technology, Cinema, and the Postcolonial Uncanny.” Heidi Schlipphacke frames the discussion with a nuanced commentary on the Freudian uncanny as locus for issues central to the Gothic, queer theory, and interdisciplinary hermeneutics in general. She underscores the power of Freud’s seminal formulation of the uncanny as “a model . . . that has traditionally informed basic trauma theory: the return of the repressed past that generates an anxiety based on the temporary flattening of a topographical and chronological order. That which is below rises to the surface, and that which was past has entered the present.” Kate Thomas pursues the uncanny as a means of reading the departed Aunt Hester as a “queer figure par excellence.” Even as Thomas explores Aunt Hester as “a queer Doppelgänger” hovering between presence and absence, Meyer treats the uncanny “in-betweenness” of children as represented in fin de siècle Vienna. As the Viennese bourgeoisie came into their own, “images of children began to serve as a multifaceted index of a past in which innocence is both present and always already lost, and in which the seeds of the future are as promising as they are foreboding.” Gopal contributes a discussion of the postcolonial uncanny in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and Ashim Ahluwalia’s John and Jane (2005). Meditating on “sonic realism” in these films, she observes that the “relation of sound and image . . . allows us to intuit how the postcolonial uncanny mutates in the era of global electronic technology.”

While these essays take up manifestations of the uncanny in the twentieth century, Erin Weinberg, in “‘Not Mad but Mated’: Trauma, Uncanny Recognition, and the Occult Environment in The Comedy of Errors,” articulates the way in which Shakespeare dramatizes the uncanny and the mysterious associations of an...