Popular Ghosts
The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture
Published on 1. April 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
360 pages
978-1-4411-6401-8 (ISBN)
Description
Located in the ambivalent realm between life and death, ghosts have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical consideration. Ghosts are ubiquitous in contemporary critical theory and in current literary and visual culture. In psychoanalysis, for example, the ghost has been crucial to Freud's uncanny, Lacan's discussion of desire and Abraham and Torok's theory of intergenerational trauma. In literary studies, the ghost is integral to the field of Gothic studies, as its prime genre characteristic. With the appearance of Derrida's 1994 "Specters of Marx", moreover, the ghost not only acquired a deconstructive dimension, but was transformed into a methodology in and of itself: hauntology or spectral studies.
Reviews / Votes
Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren are to be congratulated for bringing together such an exciting set of essays. The comparative approach uniquely pulls together studies from all corners of the world, emphasizing cultural differences in narratives of haunting whilst maintaining a strong conceptual coherence. Whether looking at popular fiction, canonical literature, film, TV or folklore, they rightly follow the imperative to historicise and contextualise the ghost. What results is a fascinating series of encounters that speaks urgently to our contemporary spooked state of being. --Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College Reviewed on the Times Higher Education website, 16th September (UK) 'Lively, engaging and extremely readable: you do not have to be a scholar in the field to appreciate the many interesting observations on contemporary culture made here' This impressive collection of essays lays to rest any notion that ghosts should be confined to limiting conceptual categories. Deploying a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary approach, Popular Ghosts rehabilitates ghosts from their dark shadows into the glare of the everyday and exposes the ubiquity of the ghostly, where and how it resides in the cultural imagination and beyond. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Reader in Literary Studies, University of the West of England, BristolMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
516 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4411-6401-8 (9781441164018)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
04/2010
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Continuum
€43.49
Available for download
E-Book
04/2010
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Continuum
€43.49
Available for download
Persons
Esther Peeren is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin, queer television, translation theory and the chronotopic dimension of diaspora. Her first book, entitled Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond appeared in 2007 with Stanford University Press and she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities (Rodopi, 2007). Currently, she is developing a project on spectrality in contemporary literature, television and film. Maria del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Latin American Studies at University College London. She has published on the haunted landscapes of the Americas, and is currently working on her manuscript titled Ghost-watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination, which has been invited by Fordham University Press. She is beginning work on a project dealing with the interface between scientific invention and poetic inventio in the works of fin-de-siecle Spanish American authors.
Content
Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, "Introduction"; I. Genealogies of the Ghost; II. Spectral Politics of the Contemporary; III. Chasing Ghosts In(to) the 21st Century; IV. Other Ghostly Spheres; V. Ambient Ghosts: Spectral Images, Sounds, and Bodies; Selected Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index.