RUcore Resource Object
RUcore Resource Object
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TitleGhost novels
NameYoo, JaeEun (author), DeKoven, Marianne (chair), McClure, John (internal member), Dienst, Richard (internal member), Barnett, Louise (outside member), Rutgers University, Graduate School - New Brunswick,
Degree Date2009-10
Date Created2009
SubjectLiteratures in English,
Ghosts in literature,
Morrison, Toni--Criticism and interpretation,
DeLillo, Don--Criticism and interpretation,
Ondaatje, Michael, 1943- --Criticism and interpretation,
Coetzee, J. M., 1940- --Criticism and interpretation
DescriptionThis dissertation examines formal innovations in contemporary novels that revise the way reading happens. Reading recent works by Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and J.M. Coetzee, I show how these innovative novelists utilize the very impossibility of properly representing others as a narrative device. I argue that the novelists design their works in such a way that reading them becomes an encounter with ghosts that confront the reader. My introductory chapter discusses the use of ghost figures in post-structuralist thought and traces their usefulness back to the Enlightenment. In the first part of the dissertation, I analyze two American novels, Love and The Body Artist to consider the influence of postmodern spectrality that emerges from reproduction of images. The phantom narrator of Love discloses and overthrows the distorted representation of African American women by inviting the reader to witness the "murder" of the Father's spirit. Chapter Three proposes that The Body Artist performs a haunting that is marked with the ghostly traces of tele-technologies. By incarnating the specter that comes out of the internet on the body of the protagonist, DeLillo attempts to instill in his novel the subversive potential of what escapes visual representation: the body and the spirit. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn to postcolonial fictions to investigate how similar narrative strategies transform the representation of none-western others. My reading of Anil's Ghost reveal that its convoluted narrative functions like the spiritual ritual it depicts--by suggesting alternative ways to become perceptive to others, it forces the reader to experience the void and grief the disappeared leave behind. In my final chapter I argue that an authorial ghost in Slow Man highlights fissures in the text, including the individual histories of Australian immigrants. Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate how these writers seek to return what has been forgotten or dismissed to disturb the reader’s comfortable and safe reading space with the "real" power of ghosts. Their ghosts break out of the world of phantoms, paradoxically representing the corporeality of others and traversing the border between the book and the reader.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references (p. 169-181)
Noteby JaeEun Yoo
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttp://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.000051929
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work