Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Global Reading.

Abstract

In this dissertation, the term “haunting” describes not just an experience of the supernatural, but a wide rage of encounters that are uncanny or unsettling, in which unacknowledged connections and enduring differences come—often urgently—to the fore. Recent U.S. and postcolonial literature is replete with such hauntings, both literal encounters with embodied specters and metaphorical contacts with the ghostly presence of the past or future. In the texts I consider, the depictions of haunting function as compelling literary devices, but the encounters across difference that they describe also provide a model for understanding the ways that they engage their readers, especially readers who approach the works from the position of cultural outsiders. Informed by theories of poststructuralist ethics, I argue that such encounters can give rise to forms of profound mutual implication that are founded on, rather than diminished by, difference and imperfect understanding, and that in doing so, they provide a model for the study of world literature. Despite their locations within distinct national and ethnic canons, the U.S. and postcolonial texts I consider become world literature through the reading positions they construct, inviting readers to take responsibility for the stories they tell, but also marking the limits of readers’ imaginative access.

The comparative readings in each chapter of “Haunting Encounters” reveal the similar strategies that U.S. and postcolonial texts employ to engage distant readers and draw them into the fictional worlds they create. Juxtaposing texts drawn from very different cultural and historical contexts, these comparisons also work to dislocate positions of readerly authority based on insider knowledge or acquired expertise, and provide a model of reading that reflects the emergence of new readers, new contacts, and new routes of circulation in our contemporary global moment. Through this comparative methodology, “Haunting Encounters” offers a definition of world literature based not on the national or cultural location of a given text or its author, but rather on the capaciousness of that text’s address to its readers.