ABSTRACT
The German 'geist der zeit' shares etymological connections with godhead and other phantoms and spirits, including perhaps most heavenly of all, alcoholic spirits. Poetic genius is William Duff's interest, and his ghostly evocation of the work of imagination reminds that the term 'genius' encompasses both creative power and supernatural presence. For Terry Castle, on the contrary, lesbian identity is as real as it is physical, 'sensual', 'fleshly', 'carnal' and therefore its retrieval from phantomisation becomes a literal matter of life and death. Invoking Sigmund Freud's essay 'On Negation', Castle concludes that this strategy permits fictions of period both to acknowledge and to deny the phenomenon of female homosexuality as 'only' a phantom. The homosexual haunting of heterosexuality has been noted by many critics in 1990s. Where Diana Fuss, like Terry Castle, laments the abjection of the homosexual implicit in its phantomisation, Teresa de Lauretis stresses political productivity of apparitional in her analysis of the film, She Must be Seeing Things.
