“Sketching the Spectral: Ghosts in French-language Graphic Novels”

56th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention

Philadelphia, PA

March 6-9, 2025

 Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2024

 This panel examines the wide-ranging use of ghosts in graphic novels. The idea is based on an application of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntologie within the context of the bande dessinée, a medium that lends itself to the spectral in that it can disrupt the presumed linear flow of past-present-future through formal elements. For Derrida, the figure of the ghost is a deconstructive agent whose spectral subjectivity disrupts the very notion of the present as tied to reality. One question this panel seeks to address concerns how ghosts might mediate an engagement with the unresolved, inescapable, or unfinished stories that haunt the 21st century. This panel invites a discussion of how ghosts are employed in graphic novels and how graphic novels employ spectral scenes that disrupt time and space to engage with present through the prism of the past.

 Topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

• Hauntings
• Representing space-time in graphic novels
• Ghosts linked to historical events
• Memory
• Trauma
• Postcolonial legacies
• Formal elements of the bande dessinée used to engage with the past

 Please submit 250 word abstracts in English or French through the NeMLA website by September 30, 2024.

 For more information, feel free to reach out to Robert Sapp (sappra@cofc.edu).