Spectral TV/Les spectralités télévisuelles

In 1983, Jacques Derrida informed us that “The future belongs to ghosts” (Ghost Dance), a statement echoed in the use of the term “spectral turn” to foreground the increasing academic interest in haunting studies at the beginning of the 21st century, focusing on themes of spectrality and the seemingly supernatural form of presence-absence. The spectral turn represents “the concerted interest in questions of the supernatural, ghostliness and haunting within cultural and critical theory during the last two decades” (Murray Leeder, The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema, 3). As the precursor of haunting studies, Jacques Derrida coined the portmanteau term “hauntology” in his Specters of Marx (1993) to signify the presence-absence of long-gone/dead historical and cultural foundations that return to haunt the present. Originating from “ontology” and “haunting”, Edyta Lorek-Jezińska notes that the term “hauntology” implies “the extent to which the sense of being is always haunted by something other that makes it impossible to describe, comprehend or enclose existence in definite categories” (“Hauntology and Cognition: Questions of Knowledge, Pasts and Futures”, 7). 

As television changes in its format (from television sets to laptops or phones), its means of access (from network to streaming to webseries) and its target audience (as broadcasting becomes narrowcasting), all while remaining haunted by previous traditions (like episode length for streaming shows no longer constrained by TV schedules), in this context, hauntology emerges as a particularly relevant framework for examining television.

This special issue of LISA is concerned with the way that the ever-changing landscape of television can be examined through the lens of spectrality, whether in terms of content: 

• from the perspective of television’s longstanding fascination with the occult, from series from the Golden Age of television like The Twilight Zone, The Munsters and The Addams Family, to contemporary takes on the vampire (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Being Human, True Blood), the ghost (Ghosts, The Haunting of Bly Manor) or the zombie (Walking Dead franchise, iZombie, Black Summer), for example
• in relation to contemporary representations of the apocalypse, where the series depicts a world altered by an event and haunted by its memory: The Last of Us, The Returned, The Leftovers, The 100, Station Eleven, Last Man on Earth, Murder Drones
• or simply where the series centers on and/or is built around an intangible past: Lost, Flashforward, Veronica Mars, Orange is the New Black, This is Us

or in terms of structure:

• where a given series owes much to the traditions that precede it, whether it be in its adherence to those traditions (Friends as a classic sitcom despite its contemporary subjects) or its rebellion against them (the arrival of the “mockumentary” format in the sitcom and its “confessional” style)
• an adapted series, where the presence of the source text – be it canonical (Pride and Prejudice) or contemporary literature (The Leftovers), a film (12 Monkeys) or series (Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes), or a mix of the above (Bates Motel) – haunts the narrative choices in the adaptation 
• the reboots (One Day at a Time), prequels (Hannibal), spinoffs (Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul) and franchises (NCIS, Law and Order), or the tradition of transnational adaptation (between the many versions of The Office or Brön/The Tunnel/The Bridge), and well as the increasing popularity of anthology series that have only a tenuous link to previous episodes/seasons (Fargo, True Detective, Black Mirror)

This list is by no means exhaustive. Potential authors are encouraged to submit an article of 7000 words or less to Asma Laater (asmae.laater@gmail.com) and Shannon Wells-Lassagne (Shannon.Wells-Lassagne@u-bourgogne.fr) by June 15, 2025.