Books by David Coughlan
Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work... more Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016
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Journal Special Issues by David Coughlan
Parallax, Mar 2016
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Derrida Today, Nov 2012
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Journal Articles by David Coughlan
Parallax, Mar 2016
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Parallax, Mar 2016
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), this essay argues, can be understood in the context... more Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), this essay argues, can be understood in the context of Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Of particular significance is Freud’s interest in the figure of Oedipus as one who solves riddles, or reads, because The Unconsoled is a text which is concerned also with the act of reading. This essay, following Pietro Pucci’s line that Oedipus’s life as a result of the prophecy is governed by both telos and tukhê, shows that Ishiguro’s novel exposes the ways in which the narrative order in the line of the text depends on the intervention of chance to preserve its apparently natural progression towards a determined end. These interventions manifest in the novel as a series of uncanny repetitions, the textual equivalent of the crossroad where, in a chance encounter, Oedipus slays his father. The crossroad, ensuring that what is fated comes to pass, seems to serve the death-drive by guaranteeing that the authored text becomes a death sentence. However, this paper finds that, at the crossroad, not only is the fated and death-defined narrative preserved, but a twin lineage is also generated by life-giving chance, so that birth and death do not occur only “in the beginning” and at “the end” of Ishiguro’s novel. What emerges instead is a figure of the reader as one who is created and who creates. The reader is both that which is written, like Fate, and dies with the text which authors it, and that which lives to ensure that what once was written is written again.
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ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Aug 2015
The comic book writer Grant Morrison has addressed the question of the animal repeatedly througho... more The comic book writer Grant Morrison has addressed the question of the animal repeatedly throughout his career, most notably in The Filth, WE3, and the earlier series which is the focus of this paper, Animal Man. Given that comic’s clear engagement with the theme of animal rights, it is odd, as Marc Singer notes, that critics have largely analysed it only as metafiction. This article seeks to readdress this, with particular reference to Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am and David Herman’s work on the representation of animal experience in graphic narratives. It might be expected that Animal Man would provide an example of “how the representation of what it is like for (nonhuman) characters to experience events is shaped by medium-specific properties of graphic narratives” (Herman), but Morrison and artist Chas Truog seem unwilling or unable to exploit the multimodality of comic narratives to deliver an exploration of animals’ worlds. Instead, it emerges, it is exactly Morrison’s use of metafiction which provides his most profound insights into animal experience and animal suffering, because the path which leads to Animal Man’s discovery that he is a comic book character also renders him powerless, and deprives him, like the animal, of speech, an experience of death, mourning, technics, laughter, and crying. This article concludes, therefore, that Morrison’s series dramatises what living is for animals and humans, and exemplifies what Derrida describes as the radical “possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower” as Animal Man becomes Animot Man.
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Derrida Today, Nov 2012
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Books by David Coughlan
Journal Special Issues by David Coughlan
Journal Articles by David Coughlan
It is Rey’s suicide, and Lauren’s subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo’s phrase within the context of Derrida’s efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren’s question, ‘What am I supposed to say?’ Derrida replies, ‘Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence’. Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo’s work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered."
Auster’s writers haunt two locations, the city and the room, uncanny places. Alone in labyrinthine cities, Auster’s characters tend to lose themselves unless they follow others, shadowing their subjects in a doubling which is, initially, a reading of the other’s passage, but then, inevitably, a re-writing of a path which is their own. As Derrida describes in “Perjuries” (speaking of trying to be faithful to those writers he follows like an acolyte), writing about, or for, another person, ghost writing so to speak, means an inevitable betrayal. But what does this mean for those who follow in mourning, as Auster’s characters do? Alone in the room, as in their lives, Auster’s characters give themselves over to the text, and become ghosts writing, uncannily undead or buried alive.
This essay analyses the significance of ghostly writing, taking place in cities and rooms, as a recurring theme in Auster’s work, arguing that, through this, Auster theorises on the nature of reading and writing as ethical practices related to the past, to mourning, to betrayal, and responsibility.
The focus of the paper is on the narrative tensions developed by these pieces. The recognition of familiar elements encourages narrative formation. The alphabetised presentation, and continuous soundtrack, suggest that the accelerated appearance of these framed texts would surely result in a narrative. Yet these discontinuous fragments link not one story but many. These segments, particular instances or general indications, are not text but intertext, a mapping of what Genette might call the architext, a cross-section of a textual matrix. These pieces illustrate the links that dissect every story, the non-linear relations to other, external, stories. Revealing the well-trod paths of generic narrative, they show us also the alternatives, the untold of every narrative.
As an understanding of the space of text develops, the work of Henri Lefebvre, and especially his 1974 text The Production of Space, comes increasingly to the fore. Criticising traditional philosophical concepts of space, which tend to view space in either purely physical or mental terms, Lefebvre's work enables us to place the discussion on textual space within a wider context. Textual space is seen to emerge as a social space, and thus a social product, capable of being employed in different ways within society, as a representation of space, aligned with mental space, or as a representational space, allied to lived spaces. The final sections of the thesis explore the reader's experience of this lived textual space, and question the role and place of textual space in the social realm."
University of Limerick, Ireland
Jane Austen and Performance by Marina Cano
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction by David Coughlan