Content area
Full Text
Spectral Returns and New Turns in Contemporary American Literature and Criticism
Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fiction. By Arthur Redding. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2011. pp. xii + 148. $27.50 cloth. $22.00 ebook
Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. By Melanie Benson Taylor. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2011. pp. 248. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper and ebook.
Since Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, contemporary literary criti- cism has taken a veritable "spectral turn," and the current fascination with spec- ters is reflected in book titles ranging from popular culture to academic studies. The new books by Arthur Redding and Melanie Benson Taylor, though very dif- ferent, both rely on the metaphor of haunting for their arguments.
Arthur Redding's Haints is based on the premise that gothic fiction is expe- riencing a contemporary resurgence. Redding's work builds on Teresa Goddu's classic Gothic America, a study that links the gothic to the project of nationhood and especially to the voices that have been excluded from prevailing representa- tions of America. Redding follows this line of reasoning into the 20th century and into the post-national era, when in the wake of 9/11 the presumed homogene- ity of the national project has come under attack. The aim of the book, he writes, is to contend that "contemporary gothic literature does speak cogently, if indi- rectly, to the sensibilities and conditions of which the attacks and the American response were symptomatic." As an apocalyptic fictional genre, the gothic fits the current cultural moment since it offers no resolutions to the traumatic fracturing of national identity.
The book's three chapters contain familiar arguments about the nation as haunted, but unexpected and provocative new groupings of writers. In chapter one, for instance, novels by Jamaica Kincaid, Isabelle Allende, and Henry James are discussed side by side as narratives of immigration and exile that trace the con- tours of an American identity construed as haunted. In chapter two,...