Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture - Paperback

by Esther Peeren (Editor), Maria Del Pilar Blanco (Editor)

Haunting has long been a compelling element in popular culture, and has become an influential category in academic engagements with politics, economics, and aesthetics. While recent scholarship has used psychoanalysis and the Gothic as frameworks with which to study haunting, this volume seeks to situate ghosts in the cultural imagination. The chapters in Popular Ghosts are united by the impulse to theorize the cultural work that ghosts do within the trans-historical contexts that comprise our understanding of everyday life. These authors study the theoretical and aesthetic genealogies of the spectral, while also commenting on the multiple everyday spaces that this category occupies. Rather than looking to a single tradition or medium, the essays in Popular Ghosts explore film, novels, photography, television, music, social practices, and political structures from different cultures to reopen the questions that surround our haunted sense of the everyday.

Author Biography

Esther Peeren is 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, entitled "Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond" appeared in 2007 with Stanford University Press and she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled "The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities" (Rodopi, 2007). Currently, she is developing a project on spectrality in contemporary literature, television and film.

Maria del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Latin American Studies at University College London. She has published on the haunted landscapes of the Americas, and is currently working on her manuscript titled Ghost-watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination," which has been invited by Fordham University Press. She is beginning work on a project dealing with the interface between scientific invention and poetic inventio" in the works of fin-de-siecle Spanish American authors.