"An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom"

Description

The dissertation analyzes haunting and the spectral in contemporary Western literature and film. I study haunting in forms such as ghosts, the talking dead, obsessive repetition, and retrogression in their relation to narrative structure. Understood as manifestations of post-traumatic history, these forms of haunting are conveyed in fictional works through the interplay between narrative temporality and focus. The dissertation begins by addressing the current polemic about the historical memory of the dictatorship and the democratic transition among Spanish academics and politicians, through a commentary on recent films by Guillermo del Toro and Antonio Hernández. Then it reviews critical contributions to the theme of haunting, with special attention to Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, and Dominick LaCapra. Building on this theoretical discussion, the second and third chapters examine novels where specters and the talking dead signify the intangible persistence of a traumatic past in the present. There I engage in a comparative reading of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and Toni Morrison's Beloved, where ghosts function as figures of collective witness and as echoes of ominous historical events. After dealing with collective history, I explore the individual experience of haunting against the backdrop of war experience and post-traumatic stress disorder in Carlos Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz [ The Death of Artemio Cruz ] and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. The fourth and fifth chapters study a narrative structure that literalizes the reflection upon a traumatic past by narrating events in reverse order. I comment on the early Modernist approaches to the subject of time reversal, and on the articulation of retrogression as a narrative form in Alejo Carpentier's short story "Viaje a la semilla" ["A Journey to the Origins"] and in Christopher Nolan's film Memento. Finally, I explore the application of this technique in relation to traumatic historical events such as genocide in Carlos Fuentes's "Las dos orillas" ["The Two Shores"] and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow.

Subjects

Series Statement

• Collections of the Harvard University Archives