Call for Submissions
SPECTRAL AMERICA:
Phantoms and the National Imagination
Ghosts and tales of the supernatural have been an important element of
American literature, folklore, and popular culture from the country’s
Puritan beginnings to the present day. Indeed, from Cotton Mather’s Wonders
of the Invisible World, to the nineteenth century’s vogue for spiritualism
and the “American Romancers” preoccupations with the fantastic, to
contemporary horror movies, New Age mysticism, and the “magical realism” of
authors like Toni Morrison, the American imagination has been obsessed, if
not defined, by the spectral and uncanny.
The essays collected in _Spectral America: Phantoms and the National
Imagination_ will investigate how ghosts, phantoms, and “the spectral” more
generally have and continue to galvanize the American imagination and
participate in the “work” of culture. Possible subjects might include, but
are not limited to:
* “America” itself as a ghostly or phantasmatic idea
* Spectrality as metaphor or political allegory
* American millenarianism and the spirit world
* Diachronic trends in spectral fiction--changing or persistent concerns
* Subcultural appropriation and deployment of spectral fiction
* Rewritings, “borrowings,” and legacies
* American cinema and spectrality
* 19th Century Spiritualism and the ghost story
* Popular culture hauntings and the marketing of ghosts (Disney, tabloids,
Elvis, “haunted tours,” New Age, cartoons and TV more generally, etc.)
* American gothicism and romanticism
* Social and psychic traumas and the “return of the repressed”
* Folkloric traditions and “urban legends”
Essays on individual authors or artists are welcome. However, hermetic
close readings are discouraged. Essays should strive to connect individual
works and authors to larger cultural trends and emphases (the “zeitgeist” if
you will).
Detailed abstracts and c.v.s should be sent by February 15, 2000 to:
Jeffrey Weinstock
97 Stage Harbor Road
Marlborough, CT 06447-1113
Questions may be forwarded to <drjeffrey@hotmail.com>.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Ph.D.
Department of English, University of Connecticut
<drjeffrey@hotmail.com>
Eat Your Dasein!
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