Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism

225 Pages·2017·1.95 MB·English

by  Matt Foley (auth.)

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Haunting Modernisms
“This book constitutes a timely critical intervention, offering highly significant
new perspectives on Derridean hauntology, on the relation between spectral-
ity and criticism, and on developments within modernism and ways of thinking
about its relation to earlier cultural formations. It is a dazzling achievement that
will be hugely influential.”
—Dr Luke Thurston, Aberystwyth University, UK
“Haunting Modernisms offers a wonderfully rich and engaging re-examination
of modernist texts. Through carefully theorised analyses of mourning, spectrality
and otherness, it breathes new critical and ethical life into ghostly tropes. It pre-
sents challenges, too, not only setting modernist wolves amongst gothic sheep,
but tracking the effects of those darker historical forms and energies that mere
modernity cannot kill.”
—Professor Fred Botting, Kingston University, UK
“Haunting Modernisms undertakes a long overdue project of theoretically
informed close readings of key modernist texts in terms of their pervasive
spectrality. Foley’s treatment of the spectral as a form of impasse in modernism
suddenly brings new interpretive and ethical vistas into view. This book is sure to
become a touchstone in the field.”
—Professor Stephen Ross, University of Victoria, Canada
Matt Foley
Haunting Modernisms
Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral
Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism
Matt Foley
Stirling, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-65484-3 ISBN 978-3-319-65485-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65485-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949472
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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For Naomi
A
cknowledgements
My sincere thanks go to Professor Dale Townshend for his support and
for the feedback he has provided during this project. I am especially
indebted to him for the knowledge that he passed on to me while I was
reading the theories of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.
Dr. Adrian Hunter has also been an unfaltering supporter of my
ideas. Working with him on the ‘Modernism and Modernity’ mod-
ule at University of Stirling has proved invaluable to broadening my
understanding of literary modernism.
I owe much thanks, too, to Professor Fred Botting for his thorough
and inspiring feedback on this work in its early stages.
Vicky Bates, at Palgrave, has been a tremendous support in helping
me bring this book to print. In terms of preparing the current manu-
script, I would like to thank Dr. Pawel Wojtas for his permission to pub-
lish my reading of D. H. Lawrence in Chap. 6. An early incarnation of
this work appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal Language and
Literary Studies of Warsaw (2011). I would also like to thank Marlene
Sammito for helping me with some of the editing in the final throes of
the project.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Modernism, Mourning, and the Ghostly 1
Part I Spectrality, the Dead and Modernist Finitude
2 Haunted Images, Deadness, and Impossible Mourning 47
3 Melancholia and the Dead in T. S. Eliot’s Aesthetics
of Purgatory 81
Part II Phantoms, Survivors, and Resistance Fantasies
4 Pursuing the Phantom in Woolf’s Aesthetics of Survival 113
5 The Gaze in Elizabeth Bowen’s Spectral Resistance
Fantasies 139
Part III Beyond Finitude and Modernist others/Others
6 The Blood-Consciousness and Lawrence’s Silent Ghosts 169
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Conclusion: The other/Other and Locating
the Ghostly 205
Index 217
B A
iBliogrAphicAl BBreviAtions
A Ford, Ford Madox. 1999 [1915]. Antwerp. In Imagist Poetry:
An Anthology, edited by Bob Blaisdell, 61–64. Mineola:
Dover Publications.
AR Lawrence, D. H. 1983 [1922]. Aaron’s Rod.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
Collected Letters Lawrence, D. H. 1979–2001. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence,
edited by James Boulton et al., 8 vols. Cambridge: UP.
CSDHL Lawrence, D. H. 1975. The Collected Short Stories of D.H.
Lawrence. London: Book Club Associates.
Diaries Asquith, Cynthia. 1968. The Diaries of Lady Cynthia Asquith
1915–1918. London: Century.
E Lacan, Jacques. 2006 [1966]. Écrits, translated by Bruce
Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
FFCP Lacan, Jacques. 1979 [1964]. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
H Bowen, Elizabeth. 1950 [1927]. The Hotel. London:
Jonathan Cape.
‘Prufrock’ Eliot, T. S. 1974b [1915]. “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.” In Collected Poems 1909–1962, 3–7. London:
Faber and Faber Ltd.
S XX Lacan, Jacques. 1999. Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality,
The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, translated by
Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
TCSEB Bowen, Elizabeth. 1983. The Collected Short Stories of
Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
xi
xii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ABBREVIATIONS
THP Bowen, Elizabeth. 1998b [1935]. The House in Paris. London: Vintage.
TMT Bowen, Elizabeth. 1999. The Mulberry Tree, edited by Hermione Lee.
London: Vintage.
TWL Eliot, T. S. 1974c [1922]. The Waste Land. In Collected Poems
1909–1962, 51–76. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.