ACLA Virtual Conference 2025: Ghost Figures in World Literature
A ghost, Avery Gordon writes, “has a real presence and demands its due, your attention” (2008, Ghostly Matters). To answer this demand, our seminar invites submissions that turn their attention to literary and artistic ghosts. After all, ghosts are profoundly literary figures; like poetics, they are defined by their repetitions and returns, and constantly referring to something else, though failing to fully represent it. However, ghosts are not any literary figures. They are haunting, and although they have a strong presence they come into life in place of something absent. Moreover, in their haunting presence, they are signalling “repressed or unresolved social violence” (Gordon, 2008).