Cryptomimesis : the gothic and Jacques Derrida's ghost writing / Jodey Castricano.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Castricano, Carla Jodey, 1947-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Derrida, Jacques.

Deconstruction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (175 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Montreal : Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2001.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

She develops the theory of cryptomimesis, a term devised to accommodate the convergence of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and certain "Gothic" stylistic, formal, and thematic patterns and motifs in Derrida's work that give rise to questions regarding writing, reading, and interpretation. Using Edgar Allan Poe's Madeline and Roderick Usher, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Stephen King's Louis Creed, she illuminates Derrida's concerns with inheritance, revenance, and haunting and reflects on deconstruction as ghost writing. Castricano demonstrates that Derrida's Specters of Marx owes much to the Gothic insistence on the power of haunting and explores how deconstruction can be thought of as the ghost or deferred promise of Marxism. She traces the movement of the "phantom" throughout Derrida's other texts, arguing that such writing provides us with an uneasy model of subjectivity because it suggests that "to be" is to be haunted. Castricano claims that cryptomimesis is the model, method, and theory behind Derrida's insistence that to learn to live we must learn how to talk Awith" ghosts.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Convocation

The First Partition

Cryptomimesis or, the Return of the Living-Dead

“‘Darling,’ it said”

The Question of the Tomb

An Art of Chicanery

Inscribing the Wholly Other

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [153]-161) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-85966-8

9786612859663

0-7735-6966-9

OCLC:

76898603