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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 Acknowledgements 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 vii ix v

vi Contents Part III Spectral Culture 9 The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology, and the 'Direct Voice' Steven Connor 10 Angels in the Architecture: the Economy of the Supernatural Clive Bloom 11 The Other Side of Plato's Wall Ralph Noyes Index 201 203 226 244 263

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 numerous 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). vii

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 suggestions 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 conversations 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. ix