Episode 217 – Books, Spirits, and Hysteria, with Asti Hustvedt

Researcher Asti Hustvedt joins Phil and JF to discuss a talk she gave at the Lily Dale Symposium this year entitled "Bibliophantoms." The question: What does it mean to "get lost" in a book? Asti's answer, drawing on her research in nineteenth-century neuroscience and spirit mediumship, amounts to a genuine weirding of the act of reading.

Asti Hustvedt is an independent scholar and writer with a PhD in French literature. Her work examines the entangled histories of science, psychology, literature, and the occult, with a particular focus on hysteria and Spiritualism. She is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times and a Book of the Year by The Independent, and the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion in Fin-de-Siècle France. She is currently writing a book on hysteria and the supernatural that examines how Eusapia Palladino and other mediums challenged—and helped shape—the emerging sciences of the mind.

New Course! To learn more on JF's upcoming online course on truth in horror literature and cinema, visit Weirdosphere.

Image: Detail of The Reader by Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942)

Music: "L'Esprit d'escalier" from Weird Studies vol. 3, and "Distant Early Warning" from Weird Studies vol 2.

REFERENCES

Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses

Jean-Martin Charcot, French physician

Pierre Janet, French physician

Lon Milo DuQuette, It’s All in Your Head

Saint Catherine of Siena, Italian mystic

Saint Augustine, Confessions

Paul Auster, American writer

Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian French philosopher

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Lionel Snell, Introduction to Freya Aswynn’s Power and Principles of the Runes

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