Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides ...
More
This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral.Less
This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral.
J. Samaine Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625362
- eISBN:
- 9781469625386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625362.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Karim Mattar
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474467032
- eISBN:
- 9781474484671
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of “world literature” from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the ...
More
This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of “world literature” from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the present day. It argues that through its history, this construct has served to incorporate if not annul local literatures and the concept of “local literature” itself, and to universalize the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play as the only literary forms appropriate to modernity. It demonstrates this thesis through a comparative reading of the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of “adab” as “literature” in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the 19th to mid-20th centuries. It then turns to the Middle Eastern novel in the global contexts of its production, translation, circulation, and reception today. Through new readings of novels and other literary works by Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, Yasmin Crowther, and Marjane Satrapi, and with reference to landmarks of Middle Eastern and world literary history ranging from the Mu‘allaqāt and Alf Layla wa Layla to Don Quixote, it argues that these texts—like “world literature” itself—are constitutively haunted by specters of the literary forms and traditions, of the life-worlds that they expressed, cast aside by modernity. In the case of the Middle Eastern novel, it is adab and all that it encompassed in the classical Arab-Islamic world that is suppressed or othered, but that spectral, yet returns in new, genuinely worldly constellations of form.Less
This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of “world literature” from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the present day. It argues that through its history, this construct has served to incorporate if not annul local literatures and the concept of “local literature” itself, and to universalize the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play as the only literary forms appropriate to modernity. It demonstrates this thesis through a comparative reading of the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of “adab” as “literature” in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the 19th to mid-20th centuries. It then turns to the Middle Eastern novel in the global contexts of its production, translation, circulation, and reception today. Through new readings of novels and other literary works by Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, Yasmin Crowther, and Marjane Satrapi, and with reference to landmarks of Middle Eastern and world literary history ranging from the Mu‘allaqāt and Alf Layla wa Layla to Don Quixote, it argues that these texts—like “world literature” itself—are constitutively haunted by specters of the literary forms and traditions, of the life-worlds that they expressed, cast aside by modernity. In the case of the Middle Eastern novel, it is adab and all that it encompassed in the classical Arab-Islamic world that is suppressed or othered, but that spectral, yet returns in new, genuinely worldly constellations of form.
Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089770
- eISBN:
- 9781781708651
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089770.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new ...
More
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new media) from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Placing Gothic forms and productions in an explicitly interdisciplinary context, it investigates how the engagement with technologies drives the dissemination of Gothic across diverse media through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while conjuring all kinds of haunting and spectral presences that trouble cultural narratives of progress and technological advancement.Less
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new media) from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Placing Gothic forms and productions in an explicitly interdisciplinary context, it investigates how the engagement with technologies drives the dissemination of Gothic across diverse media through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while conjuring all kinds of haunting and spectral presences that trouble cultural narratives of progress and technological advancement.
Patrick R. Crowley
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226648293
- eISBN:
- 9780226648323
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226648323.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
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 ...
More
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.).Less
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.).
Tamara Levitz
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199730162
- eISBN:
- 9780199932467
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730162.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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, ...
More
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.Less
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.
Daniel F. Silva
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941008
- eISBN:
- 9781789628999
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941008.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter explores how O Esplendor de Portugal by António Lobo Antunes deploys spectrality as a consistent and developed narrative device – an aesthetic mode of narrating colonial experience and ...
More
This chapter explores how O Esplendor de Portugal by António Lobo Antunes deploys spectrality as a consistent and developed narrative device – an aesthetic mode of narrating colonial experience and subjectivities ensnared within imperial discourses. The novel’s narration is, for instance, constantly interrupted by voices from the past that participated in the colonist experience, incessantly interrupting the process of writing and the production of meaning. O Esplendor de Portugal demands that we engage with spectrality at both the level of writing and historicization – producing meaning in relation to particular events, as well as at the level of identity-formation. In this regard, the novel offers profound reflections as to the externality by which identity and subjectivity is formed within Empire. This leads the chapter toward a theoretical exploration of the relationship between specters and the Freudian/Lacanian specular image or ideal ego through which an individual becomes a subject within ideology. From here, the novel also guides this chapter toward yet another rethinking of Empire’s different layers of meaning and power.Less
This chapter explores how O Esplendor de Portugal by António Lobo Antunes deploys spectrality as a consistent and developed narrative device – an aesthetic mode of narrating colonial experience and subjectivities ensnared within imperial discourses. The novel’s narration is, for instance, constantly interrupted by voices from the past that participated in the colonist experience, incessantly interrupting the process of writing and the production of meaning. O Esplendor de Portugal demands that we engage with spectrality at both the level of writing and historicization – producing meaning in relation to particular events, as well as at the level of identity-formation. In this regard, the novel offers profound reflections as to the externality by which identity and subjectivity is formed within Empire. This leads the chapter toward a theoretical exploration of the relationship between specters and the Freudian/Lacanian specular image or ideal ego through which an individual becomes a subject within ideology. From here, the novel also guides this chapter toward yet another rethinking of Empire’s different layers of meaning and power.
Lisa S. Starks
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474430067
- eISBN:
- 9781474476973
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430067.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
More
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.”Less
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.”
Lucas Hollister
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942180
- eISBN:
- 9781789623642
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942180.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Lucas Hollister
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942180
- eISBN:
- 9781789623642
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942180.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Murray Leeder
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474440929
- eISBN:
- 9781474477024
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440929.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Simon Morgan Wortham
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226658
- eISBN:
- 9780823235131
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226658.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
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, ...
More
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.Less
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.
Kas Saghafi
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231621
- eISBN:
- 9780823235094
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823231621.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
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 ...
More
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”.Less
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”.
Kas Saghafi
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231621
- eISBN:
- 9780823235094
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823231621.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
