Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing - Hardcover

Castricano, Jodey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773522646 ISBN 13: 9780773522640

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001

Synopsis

She develops the theory of cryptomimesis, a term devised to accommodate the convergence of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and certain "Gothic" stylistic, formal, and thematic patterns and motifs in Derrida's work that give rise to questions regarding writing, reading, and interpretation. Using Edgar Allan Poe's Madeline and Roderick Usher, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Stephen King's Louis Creed, she illuminates Derrida's concerns with inheritance, revenance, and haunting and reflects on deconstruction as ghost writing. Castricano demonstrates that Derrida's Specters of Marx owes much to the Gothic insistence on the power of haunting and explores how deconstruction can be thought of as the ghost or deferred promise of Marxism. She traces the movement of the "phantom" throughout Derrida's other texts, arguing that such writing provides us with an uneasy model of subjectivity because it suggests that "to be" is to be haunted. Castricano claims that cryptomimesis is the model, method, and theory behind Derrida's insistence that to learn to live we must learn how to talk Awith" ghosts.

About this title

Review:

"An extremely intelligent and well-written analysis of Jacques Derrida's theories of writing. Castricano shows how Derrida's investigation of writing and the self that is created in and through language is a fundamentally "Gothic" story. She is obviously an expert in both Derrida and the Gothic, and is conversant with the critical traditions relevant to each. This book, with its insightful reading of Derrida, offers a valuable contribution to the development of Gothic studies." Anne Williams, Department of English, University of Georgia "A strong, lucid, and engaging book on a complex and highly abstract subject. Castricano demostrates a real grasp of Derrida and the major texts in the Freudian tradion and its revision, and she continually explains or inflects one point through another in a deft synthesis of theoretical points of view." Eric Savoy, Department of English, University of Calgary

Synopsis:

In the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt have appeared with increasing frequency in Jacques Derrida's writings and, for the most part, have gone unaddressed. In "Cryptomimesis" Jodey Castricano examines the intersection between Derrida's writing and the Gothic to theorise what she calls Derrida's 'poetics of the crypt'. She develops the theory of cryptomimesis, a term devised to accommodate the convergence of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and certain 'Gothic' stylistic, formal, and thematic patterns and motifs in Derrida's work that give rise to questions regarding writing, reading, and interpretation. Using Edgar Allan Poe's 'Madeline and Roderick Usher', Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', and Stephen King's 'Louis Creed', she illuminates Derrida's concerns with inheritance, revenance, and haunting and reflects on deconstruction as ghost writing. Castricano demonstrates that Derrida's "Specters of Marx" owes much to the Gothic insistence on the power of haunting and explores how deconstruction can be thought of as the ghost or deferred promise of Marxism.

She traces the movement of the 'phantom' throughout Derrida's other texts, arguing that such writing provides us with an uneasy model of subjectivity because it suggests that 'to be' is to be haunted. Castricano claims that cryptomimesis is the model, method, and theory behind Derrida's insistence that to learn to live we must learn how to talk 'with' ghosts.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0773522646
• ISBN 13: 9780773522640
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176