This essay examines Bodie, a California ghost town, as a “modern ruin.” Working from a hauntological framework, I first investigate how Bodie enacts a rhetoric of authenticity by inviting personal encounters with the mortality of the town’s missing inhabitants. I then complicate Bodie’s brand of authenticity by identifying how efforts to rouse the ghosts of the past destabilize the ontological security of its present viewers. I ultimately argue that tourists transform the town’s ontological instability into a performance of recursive gaze whose pleasures enable a perceptual management of overlapping temporalities, particularly as visitors imagine themselves among the ghosts of Bodie.

中文翻译：

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西部鬼城的困扰遗址：加利福尼亚博迪的真实暴力和递归目光

本文将加利福尼亚的鬼城Bodie视为“现代废墟”。首先，我从一个行为学的框架出发，研究Bodie如何通过邀请亲身经历该镇失踪居民的死亡事件来表达真实性。然后，我通过确定如何唤起过去的幽灵使Bodie的真实性品牌复杂化，从而破坏当前观众的本体安全性。我最终认为，游客将小镇的本体论不稳定转化为递归的注视，其愉悦感使人们可以对重叠时间进行感知管理，尤其是当游客想象自己在博迪的幽灵之中时。