Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French

Spectrality complicates our understanding of time, challenging binaries like life and death, presence and absence, and literality and metaphor. Mind the Ghost explores textual haunting in contemporary French fiction to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers' investment in mnemonic practices. The book traces absences, disappearances, and reappearances, textual omissions, and untimely irruptions to demonstrate the power of literature to remember and communicate beyond chronological time.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 01 February 2023
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Spectrality shatters and fractures our perceptions of time, unraveling and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literalness and metaphor. A contribution to ongoing discussions in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to reexamine what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure elicits readers' investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances, and reappearances, textual omissions, and untimely irruptions to posit literature's power to both remember and communicate beyond the confines of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Weight: 600g
Dimension: 242 x 164 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800854888