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73 | 2025
Conversations avec un fantôme

Conversations with a Ghost
Edited by Carline Encarnación and Aurélie Guillain

Ghosts are in-between figures living both in the past and in the present time. Arguably, their function or prerogative consists in putting two different worlds in contact. But do they establish any form of communication between them? In literary fictions of the English-speaking world, ghosts do engage in long, insistent conversations with the living, old Hamlet being of course a case in point in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Conversing with ghosts involves negotiation–the instability of subject-positions, the quest for common ground, the accountability of the living to the dead and more generally to the past, as Derrida argues in Specters of Marx. As this special issue of Caliban hopes to show, conversations with ghosts delineate ways of dealing with our dead but also invite reflections on the esthetic, ethical, and political significance of the departed spirit’s voice. What does the talkative ghost stand for? What silenced history is it passing on, notably in fictions re-presenting invisibilized minorities? On a metafictional level, what do these garrulous ghosts tell us about the haunting presence of past stories and dead authors within the present text?

Editor's notes

Avec la participation financière de l’équipe de recherche CAS, UR801.

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