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

Meredith Goldsmith, Ursinus College
“A ‘Ghostly Cortege’ of ‘Imaginary Guests’: Ghosts of Old New York in ‘After Holbein’”
Jennifer Haley, Texas A&M University
“Living Ancestors: The Ghosts of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman”
Angela Holzer, Princeton University
“Reading Rome: Female Encounters with Phantoms of History”

Saturday, March 25

Judith Johnston, Rider University
“A Fireside Ghost Story Told by a Woman: ‘Löwensköldska ringen’”
Michaela Keck, Independent Scholar
“Ghostly Justice – L. M. Alcott’s Ghost Figures”
Andrea Spain, State University of New York at Buffalo
“Spectral Futures? Responsibility and the Weight of the Past: Necessary Failures of Representation in Zoë Wicomb’s ‘David’s Story’”
Tracie Swanson, Texas Woman’s University
“The Wicked is always Black and Feminine: Seduction and Assimilation in The Chronicles of Riddick”

Sunday, March 26

Gonul Bakay, Beykent University
“Female figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
Eugenia Gonzalez, The Ohio State University
“Feminine Perception of the Ghostly ‘Other’ in Margaret Oliphant’s Tales of the Seen and the Unseen”
Kay Martinovich, University Of Minnesota, Minneapolis
“The Unconscious, The Uncanny and the Undead: Spectrality in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Ghosts, Gender, History I