Ghost Novels: Haunting Forms in Contemporary Novels

This book examines formal peculiarity of four contemporary novels and argues that they structurally simulate haunting in order to initiate a radical reformulation of the way texts engage readers. In their recent works, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and J.M. Coetzee conjure up specters that primarily affect the form of narrative. For the four contemporary authors who address the diverse readership that their internationally marketed works have gained, a ghost is a valuable figure for eliciting through texts a non-prescriptive and anti-universal communication. Challenging the over-simplified and mass-produced electronic images of cultural "others," these specters critique the idea of modern visibility and highlight the constitutive absence against which the world is configured in the 21st century. In other words, when read together, Love, The Body Artist, Anils Ghost, and Slow Man present extensive and diverse critiques against the way contemporary media simplify and dismiss local histories and cultural others to project and facilitate a linear and comprehensive image of the world.