Feeling the unseen: imagined touch perceptions in paranormal reality television

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasting impact of a ghost hunting show may rely on what it makes the audience feel through the sense of touch. Even if the touch perceptions were imagined – or precisely because they were imagined – the experience can be all the more powerful. Intermediality research supplies the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and hypotyposis as tools for a study of the television show Ghost Adventures. A definition of senses as media is advanced in conjunction with a three-tier model of mediality to lay open the intermedial experience involved in imagined touch perceptions as medium-specific instances of rhetorical figuration.