Haunting is a form of un/knowing. The 7th issue of Forum engages with haunting and related concepts such as the uncanny, spectrality and the trace by looking at a variety of different texts and contexts. A spirited piece on clipping as an instance of spectral writing is followed by reflections on the apparition in its wide-ranging ontological, epistemological and ethical significance. The articles offer spectral readings of different media from literature and film to the radio and apply the idea of haunting to a variety of topics and issues including intertextuality in Ackroyd, Shakespeare’s agentive objects, the palimpsestic poetics of Argento’s Opera, the spectres of radio technology, post-memory and the Holocaust, and the ethics of Dicken’s ghostly Christmas. In its entirety, the issue powerfully illustrates the manifold uses of haunting as a means of approaching that which is effaced or absent, but nevertheless makes itself known in unexpected and disruptive ways.

 

Contents

Guest Articles

Clipping 
Professor Nicholas Royle (University of Sussex)

Apparitions. 
Professor Kas Saghafi (University of Memphis)

 

Articles

“But who is to say what is fake and what is real?” – Spectral and Textual Haunting in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton. 
Stefanie Albers (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Moving Like a Ghost: Tarquin’s Specter and Agentive Objects in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. 
Lizz Angello(University of South Florida)

Palimpsest, Pasolini, Poe and Poetics, or the phantoms haunting Dario Argento’sOpera (1987). 
Keith Hennessey Brown(University of Edinburgh)

Ge-stell and the Specters of the Spectrum. 
Erik Eppel (University of California at Santa Barbara)

The Shoah Simulacrum: postmemory and spectral homecoming in Maxim Biller’s novella Harlem Holocaust. 
Veronika Köver (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Dickens’s Haunted Christmas: The Ethics of the Spectral Text. 
Brad Fruhauff (Loyola University Chicago)

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Guest Articles

Clipping 
Professor Nicholas Royle (University of Sussex)

How do you describe (remember and translate) the sound of a paperclip falling?' Starting with a 'clipping' from Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, this article points to the demands hauntology places on writing, reading and being.

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Apparitions. 
Professor Kas Saghafi (University of Memphis)

What is an apparition and what does it do? Drawing on the works of Derrida, Heidegger and Levinas, this article explores the logics of haunting and the impact of the spectral on the way we come to experience and know ourselves and each other.

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Articles

“But who is to say what is fake and what is real?” – Spectral and Textual Haunting in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton. 
Stefanie Albers (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Drawing on the notions of Jacques Derrida et al, this paper explores the doubled idea of “haunting” in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton and argues that this element appears in a two-fold manner (spectral and textual) in order to disrupt the novel’s three different post-modern storylines, leading to multiple possible interpretations.

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Moving Like a Ghost: Tarquin’s Specter and Agentive Objects in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. 
Lizz Angello(University of South Florida)

In several of Shakespeare’s works, human-made and natural objects acquire a measure of agency directed toward preventing tragedy. Such ‘agentive objects’ are necessarily uncanny, both known and unknown, and this paper traces their ghostly encounters with the Roman prince Tarquin to argue for a re-reading of history.

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Palimpsest, Pasolini, Poe and Poetics, or the phantoms haunting Dario Argento’sOpera (1987). 
Keith Hennessey Brown (University of Edinburgh)

Offering an alternative to the predominant psychoanalytic readings of Italian director Dario Argento's horror and thriller films, this paper explores the theme of haunting in his 1987 film Opera through the idea of the palimpsestic trace and the literary and cinematic theories of Edgar Allan Poe and Pier-Paolo Pasolini. It identifies the film's key intertexts as Gaston Leroux's gothic novel The Phantom of the Opera, William Shakespeare's Macbeth and the films Peeping Tom by Michael Powell and A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. Poe's emphasis upon ‘unity of effect’ in The Philosophy of Composition and Pasolini's notion of a ‘cinema of poetry’ are used to argue that Argento's distinctive aesthetic strategies are used to create a haunting sense of anxiety throughout the film that is specifically related to the spectre of AIDS and the accompanying shared anxieties the then-new disease presented around the body and sexuality.

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Ge-stell and the Specters of the Spectrum. 
Erik Eppel (University of California at Santa Barbara)

Carrying Heidegger’s concepts concerning modern technics into the domain of media, this paper explores pirate and/or free radio stations and argues that these constitute a nascent ‘saving power’ in commercial communication. The paper sketches an isomorphism between this ‘saving power,’ the spectrality of technics and local social movements employing radio.

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The Shoah Simulacrum: postmemory and spectral homecoming in Maxim Biller’s novella Harlem Holocaust. 
Veronika Köver (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Questions of memory and effacement have come to haunt The German postwar intellectual landscape. Exploring these notions through the prism of Maxim Biller’s novella “Harlem Holocaust”, this article argues that the transgenerational current of traumatic postmemory – and its hypocritical exploitation – obstruct wholesome attempts of working through the past. Read against the backdrop of Baudrillard’s concept of the simualcrum, the analysis of Harlem Holocaust ultimately exposes how this memory discourse has been hollowed out, and the central event substituted by its spectre, the hologram of the Holocaust.

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Dickens’s Haunted Christmas: The Ethics of the Spectral Text. Brad Fruhauff (Loyola University Chicago)

Taking Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as its text, this paper considers haunting in relation to Derridean ‘hauntology,’ Levinasian ethics, and Christian metaphysics, and explores haunting’s spiritual and ethical dimension in terms of its disturbance of the enclosure of the self in both Scrooge and the story’s readers.

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Editors

Jack Burton
Jana Funke