Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French(88 Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures)

Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements A Note on Translations Conjuration. Definition Compulsion Introduction. Timeshells Part I | Hauntologies 1. With Cixous After Derrida 2. On Timely Disruptions Part II | Reading Ghosts 3. Naming Catastrophe (Salvayre, Wajsbrot) 4. Missing Inventory or Inventory of the Missing (Modiano, Salvayre, Adimi) 5. Uncontainable Containers (Modiano, Alikavazovic) 6. Photographing Absence and Absent Photographs (Ferrari, Alikavazovic) 7. Indelible Stains (Sebbar, Adimi, Faye) Epilogue or Reconjuration. Haunting Walls Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Sonja Stojanovic is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame.

Review :
“Showing impressive theoretical acumen and including a fascinating range of recent fiction, this book is an exhilarating read. It is undoubtedly an important intervention in ghost studies and modern literary studies.” Colin Davis, Royal Holloway University of London ‘In short, Mind the Ghost is both a demanding and necessary work that invites us to meditate, ultimately, not only on sites of memory, but on even more contemporary sites and places of haunting that the French Calais or the Italian Lampedusa have become.’ Catherine Nesci, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature ‘This monograph would be useful for scholars and students of contemporary literature who have an affinity with experimental texts and are approaching literature as textual installations, in its rich intermedial aspects. It would also find its place in courses on European memory studies as it would be a valuable addition to historical accounts of twentieth-century conflicts.’ Kaliane Ung, The French Review ‘In her impressive first book, Sonja Stojanovic skillfully demonstrates that one does not need to be a house to be haunted and that one does not need to be human to haunt… Mind the Ghost will change the way you read textual things, and as the narrator from Modiano’s Un Cirque passe would add, “especially the suitcases”.’ Morgane Cadieu, Contemporary French Civilization ‘Avec ce livre, Sonja Stojanovic fait une intervention remarquée dans le domaine des études mémorielles et s’inscrit, par ce biais, dans une conversation théorique en cours depuis une bonne vingtaine d’années sur le rôle de la littérature à l’égard des traumatismes historiques et de leurs réverbérations dans le temps présent.’ ‘With this book, Sonja Stojanovic makes a notable contribution to the field of memory studies, and in so doing joins a theoretical conversation that has been going on for over twenty years about the role of literature in dealing with historical trauma and its reverberations in the present.’ Michaela Hulstyn, Nouvelles Études Francophones (translated from French)