The »Spectral Turn«

The »Spectral Turn« PDF

Author: Zuzanna Dziuban

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2019-11-30

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 383943629X

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Over the last decades, studies on cultural memory have taken a »spectral turn« and have explored the potential of haunting metaphors for addressing past instances of violence that affect present cultural realities. This book contributes to the discussions on haunting by enquiring into its culturally and historically located modality: the emergence of the figure of the Jewish ghost in contemporary Polish popular culture, literature and critical art. Gathering contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, it locates this new interest in Jewish ghosts on the map of other Polish (and Jewish) ghostologies and seeks to explore their cultural and political functions in the Polish post-Holocaust imaginaire.

The "spectral Turn"

The

Author: Zuzanna Dziuban

Publisher: Transcript Publishing

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783837636291

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Biographical note: Zuzanna Dziuban (PhD) is a research fellow at the University of Konstanz and the University of Amsterdam. Her research focus is on memory studies, dead body studies, and the afterlives of the Holocaust.

The Spectralities Reader

The Spectralities Reader PDF

Author: Maria del Pilar Blanco

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-08-29

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 1441136894

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The Spectralities Reader is the first volume to collect the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the “spectral turn” of the early 1990s, which saw ghosts and haunting conjured as compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social sciences. Surveying the past twenty years from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the Reader displays the wide range of concerns spectrality, in its diverse elaborations, has been called upon to elucidate. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race, and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived by way of the spectral. A primer for the wide readership engaged with cultural interpretations of ghosts and haunting that go beyond the confines of the fictional and supernatural, The Spectralities Reader includes twenty-five groundbreaking texts by prominent contemporary thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak to Avery Gordon and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a general introduction and six section introductions by the editors.

Spectral America

Spectral America PDF

Author: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Publisher: Popular Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780299199548

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From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans' conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today's resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues. Spectral America asserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as cinema have always been constructions embedded in specific historical contexts and invoked for explicit purposes, often political in nature. The essays address the role of "spectral evidence" during the Salem witch trials, the Puritan belief in good spirits, the convergence of American Spiritualism and technological development in the nineteenth century, the use of the supernatural as a tool of political critique in twentieth-century magic realism, and the "ghosting" of persons living with AIDS. They also discuss ghostly themes in the work of Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Gloria Naylor, and Stephen King.

The Spectral Arctic

The Spectral Arctic PDF

Author: Shane McCorristine

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1787352463

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Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

Haunting Experiences

Haunting Experiences PDF

Author: Diane Goldstein

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2007-09-15

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0874216818

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Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.

Ghosts -- Or the (Nearly) Invisible

Ghosts -- Or the (Nearly) Invisible PDF

Author: Maria Fleischhack

Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9783631665664

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This collection of articles looks at ghost stories ranging from the Middle Ages to contemporary movies from different perspectives, both interdisciplinary and international. Spectral phenomena from Antarctic literature to Haitian Voodoo, Russian poetry to Irish novels are discussed in relation to their places in history and the media.

The Spectral Metaphor

The Spectral Metaphor PDF

Author: E. Peeren

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-01-30

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 113737585X

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What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects – migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons – are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.

Hauntology

Hauntology PDF

Author: Katy Shaw

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-16

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 3319749684

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Post-millennial writings function as a useful prism through which we can understand contemporary English culture and its compulsion to revisit the immediate past. The critical practice of hauntology turns to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future. Since the Year 2000, popular culture has been inundated with representations of those who occupy a space between being and non-being and defy ontological criteria. This Pivot explores a range of contemporary English literatures - from the poetry of Simon Armitage and the drama of Jez Butterworth, to the fiction of Zadie Smith and the stories of David Peace - that collectively unite to represent a twenty-first century world full of specters, reminiscence and representations of spectral encounters. These specters become visible and significant as they interact with a range of social, political and economic discourses that continue to speak to the contemporary period. The enduring fascination with the spectral offers valuable insights into a contemporary English culture in which spectral manifestations signal towards larger social anxieties as well as to specific historical events and recurrent cultural preoccupations. The specter confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realisation that we must engage with it in order to create meaning. Narrative agency is the primary motivating force of its return, and the repetition of the specter functions to highlight new meanings and perspectives. Harnessing hauntology as a lens through which to consider the specters haunting twenty-first century English writings, this Pivot examines the emergence of a vein of hauntological literature that profiles the pervasive presence of the past in our new millennium.