Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French [Hardcover]

Mind the Ghost articulates how textual haunting can occur through such figures as names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. Through close readings of recent fiction by a range of authors writing in French, this book examines how readers themselves can be haunted by someone else's memories of war and genocide.Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers' investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century - in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda - this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature's power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gael Faye, Jerome Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leila Sebbar, and Cecile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.Acknowledgements
A Note on Translations

Conjuration. Definition Compulsion
Introduction. Timeshells

Part I | Hauntologies
1. With Cixous After Derrida
2. On Timely Disruptions

Part II | Reading Ghosts
3. Naming Catastrophe (Salvayre, Wajsbrot)
4. Missing Inventory or Inventory of the Missing (Modiano, Salvayre, Adimi)
5. Uncontainl“r