Aranda, José F.2023-05-242023-05-242023-052023-04-19May 2023Stoeltje, Sam. "Of Ghosts and Justice: Spectral Politics in 20th-Century U.S. Literature." (2023) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/114888">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/114888</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/114888“Of Ghosts and Justice: Spectral Politics in 20th-Century U.S. Literature” attends to the representation of the spectral in transgeneric literary works, at the same time resignifying and retheorizing the term “spectral” to include its ostensive “literal” referent, that is, the ontologically and epistemologically and ontically impossible within modern and post-modern discursive cultures. Following but departing from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, this dissertation locates moments of non-dominant and abject(ed) metaphysics as they emerge in generically uncertain texts, and seeks to understand these moments in relation to struggles for justice at personal, institutional, and geopolitical scales: struggles against capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy, cis/hetero/patriarchy, ecological violence, as well as the more abstract violence of epistemological genre-making. Bringing Derridean deconstruction together with decolonial theories, specifically theories of genre by Jodi Byrd and cosmogonic intellectual history from Sylvia Wynter, I attempt through my readings to “let the spirit speak” and to listen from a position of genuine onto/epistemological openness. The primary texts include Black Elk and John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, literary-ethnographic writing by Carlos Castaneda and Zora Neale Hurston, the autotheory-practice of Gloria Anzaldúa, and an unknown work of channeled literature from the 1970s, The Great Adventure: A Handbook for Living in this World and on the Other Side, written by and through my departed friend Alice Neihardt Thompson. Through reading these texts, some of the complex mythopoetics underpinning U.S. literature come into focus, including interrelations between the Frontier and Spiritualism, coloniality and anthropology, appropriation, queer feminism, psychedelic countercultures, as well as Indigenous and African-diasporic cultures of belief. Interweaving autoethnography and other transgeneric praxes, the dissertation arrives at a conviction of the importance of onto/epistemological openness in reading U.S. literature. Encountering these strange, metaphysically abject and uncanny texts, I note that spectral literatures are a practice of myth-making and re-making, and that such makings are full of political potential and peril. Given that myth is defined by its claim to sacredness, transcendence, and a position of being beyond critique, I close with a meditation on the (im)possible necessity of cultivating a mythocritique and its relation to academic writing.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.U.S. LiteratureReligious StudiesLiterary TheoryDeconstructionDecolonial TheorySettler Colonial StudiesSylvia WynterJodi ByrdJacques DerridaSpecters of MarxGenre TheoryTransgenreGloria AnzaldúaJohn NeihardtBlack ElkBlack Elk SpeaksZora Neale HurstonCarlos CastanedaCultural AnthropologyAlice Neihardt ThompsonSpiritualismNeo-SpiritualismPsychical ResearchKenneth BurkeAnarchist StudiesAnti-CivilizationAnarcho-PrimitivismRadical EcologyDavid GraeberIndigenous CritiqueThesis2023-05-24