ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In most cultures the figure of the ghost stands for a forceful separation of past and present. Some cultures integrate the ghost figure into the present in order to provide a sense of continuity. In literature and film the ghost motif has been directly associated with particular cultural meanings, but has also been used as a plot element free of the confines of realism. The meaning of the ghost is deferred (Derrida). This quality of the ghost, neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, provided a forum for addressing feminist issues. Some of the first ghost stories were written by women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) was only the best-known of an enormous body of fiction of its type. Many examples address ethnic/race issues. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s the “Foreigner” (1900) the supernatural element is connected to the “foreign” identity of the protagonist. This seminar examines and assesses the various versions of the ghost motif in literature as an opportunity to articulate identity questions, cultural fears, and minority issues. We will focus on ghostly ambitions written by women writers. The figure of the ghost crosses boundaries of language, nationality, culture, class, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. At the same time it is the Other within who speaks for all of them. How has this oppositional quality been used and by whom?

Friday, March 24

Christopher Brooks, Wichita State University
“Gendering Ghosts: An Historical Overview”
Alysia Kolentsis, University of Toronto
“Home Invasions: Monitory Signals in the Supernatural Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Rhoda Broughton, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon”
Bruce Plourde, Temple University
“The Margaret-Ghost and Jewett’s Sibyl”
Sasha Handley, University of Warwick
“A New Canterbury Tale: ‘The Haunting of Margaret Bargrave’”

Saturday, March 25

Rita Felski, University of Virginia
“Enchantment”
Ali Barish, Stephen F. Austin State University
“Maryse Condé and the Re-birth of the Other”
Judith Zeitlin, University of Chicago
“The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts in Chinese Literature”
Lynn Ta, University of California, San Diego
“Haunting The Nation: Global Labor And Grief In Bone”

Sunday, March 26

Monika Elbert, Montclair State University
“Retrieving the Language of the Ghostly Mother: Displaced Daughters and the Search for Home”
Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam
“Gendering the Ghost and Ghosting Gender in Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon”
Veronica Hendrick, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
“American Realities Influenced by Ghostly Experiences: Toni Morrison’s and Amy Tan’s Use of Reincarnation and Magic”
Diane Treon, CUNY Graduate Center
“Bodies That Resist Matter: ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and ‘Akira’ as Bildungsromane for the Posthuman Multipersona

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Ghosts, Gender, History II