Reading & Composition
GHOSTLY MATTERS: LANGUAGE, SPEECH AND SILENCE IN LITERATURE
It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look.[1]
—Avery Gordon
Taking cues from Avery Gordon, this course will consider seriously the matter of ghosts in literary texts. Ghosts are not simply the incorporeal return of the dead associated with religious or spiritual practices and beliefs. Rather, they are public, social figures whose haunting can take us to “that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.”[2] Their practice of haunting underscores contemporary concerns about narratives of exclusion and silencing, as well as the concern with what can actually be known and the ethical considerations that such investigations should demand. The course will ask the following: 1) What is the political status of ghosts in memory, commemoration, and the nostalgia of exile? 2) What can our study of ghosts reveal about the historical and linguistic structures that are the sources of their haunting? 3) What conceptual and ethical dilemmas must we confront in such an investigation? 4) How do we capture the ghostly-speak?
Required Texts:
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Anzia Yezierska: Bread Givers: A Novel
Nguyen Du: Tale of Kieu
Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Truong, Monique, The Book of Salt,
Le Thi Diem Thuy. The Gangster We’re All Looking For
Bao Ninh, The sorrow of war
Other readings:
Selections from the Bible
Selected poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin
[1] Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.22.
[2] Gordon, 8