The Spectralities Reader Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory [Paperback]

Ghosts, spirits, and specters have played important roles in narratives throughout history and across nations and cultures. A watershed moment for this area of study was the publication of Derrida'sSpecters of Marxin 1993, marking the inauguration of a spectral turn in cultural criticism. Gathering together the most compelling texts of the past twenty years, the editors transform the field of spectral studies with this first ever reader, employing the ghost as an analytical and methodological tool.The Spectralities Readertakes ghosts and haunting on their own terms, as wide-ranging phenomena that are not conscripted to a single aesthetic genre or style.

Divided into six thematically discreet sections, the reader covers issues of philosophy, politics, media, spatiality, subject formation (gender, race and sexuality), and historiography. It anthologizes the previously published work of theoretical heavyweights from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben, alongside work by literary and cultural historians such as Jeffrey Sconce and Roger Luckhurst.

Mar?a del Pilar Blancois University Lecturer in Spanish American Literature and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author ofGhost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination(2012).

Esther Peerenis Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin, queer television, translation theory and the chronotopic dimension of diaspora. Her first book, entitledIntersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyondappeared in 2007 with Stanford University Press and she also co-edited a collection of essays entitledThe Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities(2007). Currently, she is developing a project on spectrality in contemporary literature, television and fil³1