Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History

274 Pages·1999·13.724 MB·English

by  Peter Buse, Andrew Stott (eds.)

Ghosts
Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History
Edited by
Peter Buse and Andrew Stott
GHOSTS
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Ghosts
Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History
Edited by
Peter Buse
and
Andrew Statt
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue recard far this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-333-71144-6 ISBN 978-0-230-37481-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230374812
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21739-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ghosts : deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history / edited by Peter
Buse and Andrew Stott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21739-6 (cloth)
I. Ghosts. 2. Deconstruction. 3. Psychoanalysis-History.
4. Ghosts in literature. I. Buse, Peter, 1970- I!. Stott,
Andrew,1969-
BF147l.G48 1998
133.1-dc21 98-34810
CIP
Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Peter Buse and Andrew Stott 1999
Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied ar transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by
the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to
confarm to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Transferred to digital printing 2002
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: a Future for Haunting
Peter Buse and Andrew Statt 1
Part I Spectrality and Theory 21
1 Spectres of Engels
Willy Maley 23
2 'Something Tremendous, Something Elementar:
On the Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis
Roger Luckhurst 50
3 Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Poetics
of Urban Modernism
Christina Britzolakis 72
4 Spectre and Impurity: History and the
Transcendental in Derrida and Adorno
Nigel Mapp 92
Part 11 Uncanny Fictions 125
5 Anachrony and Anatopia: Spectres of Marx,
Derrida and Gothic Fiction
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas 127
6 Theft, Terror, and Family Values: the Mysteries
and Domesticities of Udolpho
Natalka Freeland 144
7 The Medium of Exchange
Mandy Merck 163
8 The Postcolonial Ghost Story
Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs 179
v
vi Contents
Part III Spectral Culture 201
9 The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism,
Technology, and the 'Direct Voice'
Steven Connor 203
10 Angels in the Architecture: the Economy of
the Supernatural
Clive Bloom 226
11 The Other Side of Plato's Wall
Ralph Noyes 244
Index 263
Notes on the Contributors
Clive Bloom is Reader in English and American Studies at
Middlesex University. He is the general editor of the Insights series
for Macmillan and the author and editor of many books on literary
theory, popular literature and cultural history, including Cult
Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (1996).
Christina Britzolakis is Lecturer in English at the University of
Warwick. She has published articles on the 'masses' in the poetry of
Pound, Eliot and Yeats, on literature and politics in the 1930s, and
on modernist appropriations of Hamlet. She is the author of Sylvia
Plath: Rhetoric, Gender, Subjectivity (1996).
Peter Buse is Lecturer in English at the University of Salford. He
has published articles in Textual Practice, Cultural Critique, The
Journal oj Dramatic Theory and Criticism and The European Journal oj
Cultural Studies.
Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at
Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of numer
ous books and articles on a variety of topics including Dickens,
Beckett, postmodernity and cultural value.
Natalka Freeland is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Alberta. She completed her doctoral dissertation in comparative
literature at Yale University, writing on suspense fiction from
Walpole to Conan Doyle.
Ken Gelder is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at
Melbourne University, Australia. His books include Reading the
Vampire (1994) and The Oxjord Book oj Australian Ghost Stories (1994).
He has recently co-edited The Sub-Cultures Reader (1996) with Sarah
Thornton.
Jane M. Jacobs is Lecturer in Geography at Melbourne University,
Australia. Her publications include Edge oj Empire: Postcolonialism
and the City (1996).
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viii Notes on the Contributors
Roger Luckhurst is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College,
University of London. He has written on contemporary fiction,
Derrida, deconstruction and psychoanalysis and is currently
working on tele-technologies.
Willy Maley is Reader in English Literature at the University of
Glasgow, and author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), and Salvaging
Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997), and co-editor of
Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of ConJlict, 1534-1660
(1993), Postcolonial Criticism (1997), and A View of the Present State of
Ireland: from the First Published Edition (1997).
Nigel Mapp teaches at the University of Leeds. He has published
widely on critical theory and continental philosophy, especially on
the work of William Empson and Paul de Man.
Mandy Merck is a former editor of the film and television studies
journal Screen. From 1988 to 1991 she produced lesbian and gay
programmes for Channel 4 and the BBC. Since then she has taught
at Cornell, Duke and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The
author of Perversions: Deviant Readings (1993), she now lectures in
media studies at the University of Sussex.
Ralph Noyes was Under-Secretary in the Civil Service. Honorary
Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research from 1990 to 1998, he
wrote a novel, The Secret Property (1985), and edited a collection, The
Crop Circle Enigma (1991). He also wrote several short science-fiction
stories as weIl as papers and articles on anomalous topics. Sadly,
Ralph Noyes died in May 1998.
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas is Associate Professor of English at Aristotle
University in Thessaloniki, Greece. She has published extensively
in the areas of Victorian literature, feminism and psychoanalytic
approaches to literature. Her book Fictions of the Female Self was
published in 1991.
Andrew Stott is Lecturer in English Literary and Cultural Studies
at the University of Westminster. He has published articles in,
among other journals, Textual Practice, Criticism, Word and Image
and Cahiers Elisabethains.
Acknowledgements
For their patience, we would like to thank all the contributors and
especially Charmian Hearne, our editor at Macmillan. Avril Horner,
Nigel Mapp and Nuria Triana-Toribio provided valuable sugges
tions on the Introduction, which was also presented in a slightly
different form to the Northern Critical Theory Seminar at the
University of Staffordshire, 6 December 1997. For countless conver
sations on ghostly matters, thanks are due to colleagues at the
University of Wales, Cardiff, the University of Leeds, the University
of Salford and the University of Westminster where we studied or
taught during the development of this book.
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