Freedgood 2014

Freedgood, Elaine. "Ghostly Reference." Representations 124 (Winter 2014): pp. 40-53. Web.

• [Epigraph] There is but one world and its division into disconnected spheres is not due to being as such, but to the organization of human knowledge of being. - Theodor Adorno, Stars Down to Earth
• 40 Ghosts are for some of us literal and for some of us only allegorical: I want to think of them as both at once, in order to consider what I call ghostly reference. Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the free play of belief and the production of worlds - two necessary conditions for the formation and sustenance of the liberal subject, as I will discuss in what follows. Refusing to give up the ghost slows ghostly reference to a halt, allowing us to think about the materiality as well as the meaning of the ghost.
• 41ff case studies - primitive ghosts (Amos Tutuola, Palm Wine Drinkard and My life in the Bush of Ghosts) and allegorical ghosts (Shakespeare, or what he's been made into)
  • frame isn't long diachrony 1600-1950 but C20 Anglo-American lit crit (so first half C20)
• 42 As an example of an African mind, his apparent beliefs and ideas were part of the value of his work in a way that Shakespeare's or Dickens's ghosts are not literally valued, or, for that matter, literally "read."
• Shakespeare's ghosts, also derived from folklore, literary sources, and Christianity, are rationalized and allegorized very early on in the project of Anglo-American literary criticism[.]
  • Look up: Elmer Soll, 1907 PMLA
• 43: Here [even in New Historicist accounts like Greenblatt and Belsey] metaphor and meaning replace the living dead in whom Elizabethans routinely believed, despite the banishing of purgatory by the Protestant church; we do not explore the heterodoxy at the heart of our canon, the set of beliefs that make our "greatest" writers completely unlike us, and perhaps unbearably so.
• Tutuola and Shakespeare are emblems of two problems in literary criticism: literal reading of a text that is assumed itself to be only literal and allegorical reading of a text that is itself assumed to be only allegorical.
• 44: The primitive, the genuine African lives in one world; the liberal subject, on the other hand, requires many, in part to disavow the many deathworlds that can be variously construed, in the flexing of genre, as reality or fantasy, history or fiction, as rupturing diegetic and ontological break the world into worlds.