AustLit

'In Specters of Marx Derrida urges us to recognise the phantoms that haunt the literary, the political, the social, the corporate, insisting that '[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony'. Faced with the recognition of the heavily haunted landscape that we invariably inhabit, we have been compelled to seek out appropriate metaphors to represent such phenomena. Captured through the figure of the ghost, the vampire, the monstrous and the uncanny, the spectral is the new black - we all see dead people! The problem is, of course, that they are not necessarily the same people - or if they are, they mean different things to different folk. Where once these phantoms might have been seen to exist at the limit of the imaginary, they are now recognised as imbuing and infiltrating the very marrow of our being, both troubling and constituting the stories that we tell, the films that we make, the theses that we write.' (Author's abstract)