1. Introduction: Of Spectrality

Abstract

Establishing the theoretical framework for an analysis of ghost writing in contemporary American fiction, Coughlan explores what a ghost is through a close engagement with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Though this text is widely credited with initiating theory’s spectral turn, many ghost scholars have shown a reluctance to speak to the Derridean specter, preferring ontology over hauntology. Employing the language of conjuration and exorcism, however, Coughlan shows how the ghost haunts any definition or concept of the USA, of the present, or of the self, and exactly because the specter is at work in all things and in all of life. He concludes that we survive only as ghosts.