Search Results

This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.

Taking up the comparative case of modern phantasmagoria, this epilogue resituates the book as offering a hitherto neglected, but important, prehistory to the Christianizing belief in ghosts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages on the one hand, and on the other the rationalizing attempts in modernity to dispel or eradicate such a belief—if only to displace it elsewhere (e.g., the enchantments of technology, psychoanalysis, physiological theories of hallucination, etc.).

Chapter 7 explores how formal fragmentation in Perséphone reveals its authors’ melancholic attitudes. The interpretive method here is based on Freud’s Trauer und Melancholie, Derrida’s spectrality, and Abraham and Torok’s notion of the crypt. Gide negotiates his mother’s death and the threat of young homosexuals committing suicide by escaping into archeological fantasy, and thereby connecting with a culture of gay mourning associated with British aestheticism and Walter Pater. His Persephone, like Eurydice, wanders between life and death, achieving what Christopher Peterson calls the “ultimate queer act.” Stravinsky melancholic stance is evident in “Sur ce lit,” which encrypts forbidden desire linked to death. The use of an unpublished setting of Petrarch’s Dialogue on Joy and Reason reveals the trauma of desire and loss in the heart of his neoclassic style. In his eagerness to respect the alterity of the dead, Stravinsky creates the type of disruptive form characteristic of Benjamin’s modernist allegory.

In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.

This conclusion shows how the different positions staked out by the writers in Beyond Return trace a trajectory that leads from anti-modernist resumption or rehabilitation (a willful regression that positions itself as a post-critical progression) through ‘bathmological’ meta-discursive gestures (a critical repetition that changes the meaning of conventions and forms) and finally to spectral poetics which blur the very possibility of defining a clear discursive position or literary self-identity. I thus suggest that Jean Rouaud, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Echenoz, and Antoine Volodine are authors that exemplify different approaches to the metaphor of return, ranging from narrow historical readings of literary aesthetics to more oppositional uses of form and radically decontextualized conceptions of literarity. Against the contextual reductionism of closed national histories of the contemporary, this study concludes by suggesting how different engagements with popular fictional forms allow us to imagine alternative literary historical narratives and new political readings of French literature.

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”

This concluding chapter reviews the different ways of reading the political significance of the spectre during a time when a number of political issues were communicated and reconstituted into other—ghostly—forms. It shows how Dickens, Riddell and Collins explore the way consciousness within a money-based society was created as if it were like money. It then considers the narratives on national and colonial identities that were opened up by studies of the spectral, and shows how to read spectrality. This chapter also discusses fictional spectres and spirit messages.

This chapter examines a theory of spectrality that relates it to a specific field of economics. It shows that the connections between economics and the ghostly relate to the perception of paper money, at a time when such promissory notes were redeemed for gold. It reveals that paper money was previously considered as spectral money (not ‘real’), and like ghosts had a liminal presence. This chapter also aims to present a new theorisation of the spectral that allows a re-reading of the economic contexts of the nineteenth century.

This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally or illegally acquired makes the self ghostly and visible to the amorality of the economic system. It then introduces ‘The Ghost in the Bank of England’, where Collins addresses the relationship between paper money and the ghostly.

This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.

This chapter investigates how representations of spectrality reformulate a model of national identity in Henry James. It shows that readings of haunted houses and hotels in several of James's works reveal how the historicity of the spectral expresses a nationally liminal Anglo-American identity politics. It also notes that a persistent theme of money and spectrality exists, which is familiar from Dickens, Riddell and Collins, and relates to conceptions of economic and national power and powerlessness.

This chapter takes a look at the ghost stories of M.R. James. It studies the way the seemingly conservative Victorian and Edwardian world of James's tales hides a critique of an apparently amoral modernism. It notes that some of his tales put certain demands on readers, and reveals that James suggests that the donnish world is truly Gothic due to its consideration of the unfolding pictorial Gothic narrative. This chapter also discusses how the modernist literary culture of the 1920s can be re-read through a discourse of spectrality.

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

This chapter, rather than starting to build a prospective model of the counter-institution in view of the predicament the university finds itself in today, explores this other or “counter” temporality, the temporality not just of the counter-institution but of the “counter” itself: a “counter” logic, force, movement, rhythm. It begins by showing why one cannot simply force a “counter” logic or movement, a counter-institution, to “be quick about it,” or call for counter-institutions in such an unequivocal way. Yet, as the analysis proceeds or unfolds, it also suggests that the “counter” begins by coming back, promising to answer the call along the lines of a certain artifactuality or actuvirtuality, or in other words, by way of complex effects of spectrality, virtuality, the as if, and the tele-effect, which together haunt our electronic communications networks and computerized systems.

This chapter suggests that an important dimension of what Jacques Derrida has called “spectrality” has to do with the look or gaze of the other. To explore the ramifications of the regard of and for the other in Derrida's writings, this chapter juxtaposes three texts: The Gift of Death, Specters of Marx, and Echographies of Television. What all three texts state is that responsibility and inheritance are brought about by and through an asymmetrical spectral regard beyond any exchange. The chapter then discusses that the entire reading of responsibility in Derrida be oriented by a phrase repeated in a number of Derrida's writings, a phrase that—although its complexity cannot be fully captured in translation—perfectly encapsulates the instance of the spectral look: “ça me regarde”.

Jacques Derrida's essay which is discussed in this chapter is a meditation on death and mourning, memory and ghosts, the referent and the other, the proper name and the unique, the look and the image, and their intertwining in the structure of photography. The commentary in this chapter attempts to graft a few remarks onto just one passage of Derrida's essay, a passage that ties together all the motifs in order to elaborate the relation between photography and spectrality. By functioning as a testament or proof for the exigency of the absolute singularity of the other, or “the referent”, photography demonstrates how death and the referent are brought together in the same structure. It is this “conjugation” of death and the referent in “the photographic event” that gives photography its “spectral” structure.

Dogflesh (Guzzoni, 2012) presents the splitting of the voice (its invoking of the other as well as the self) as a means to explore the fissures, ruptures, and divisions of the contemporary Chilean postdictatorial landscape as well as to intimate how an ethics of listening might begin to overcome them. The relationship of voice to body takes on highly charged political significance in the context of Chile’s recent past in the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship. The body of the victim of torture of the Pinochet regime emerges as a foreign body in the aural texture of the film, whilst the voices of victims of torture are ventriloquized in the present, most particularly through the dog belonging to the film’s protagonist.