| Popis: |
This paper takes as its starting point Derrida’s notion of spectrality, which ‘is at work everywhere’, and uses this theoretical concept to advance a new reading of The Diviners itself, one which sees it as a ghostlike manifestation of the other. The Diviners not only develops its own detailed blueprint of personal hauntings, but is also a broad philosophical meditation on the entire spectral process associated with the Canadian sensation of cultural unease. As part of this overview, Laurence devotes close attention to the question of literary hauntology, displaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues—the prospect of losing our self and being taken by another, unfamiliar self, literary phantoms which haunt the Canadian imagination etc.— which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re-read the spectral condition of water on the base of Bachelard’s essay L’eau et les rêves. I will reflect on the importance of liquid images which represent the inner world of Canadian dreams, the socio-cultural spectres that return in a sort of a ghostly act of disfiguration with important consequences for the phantasmatic condition of Canada, in which representation is fragmented. |
