Haunting has long been a compelling element in popular culture, and has become an influential category in academic engagements with politics, economics, and aesthetics. While recent scholarship has used psychoanalysis and the Gothic as frameworks with which to study haunting, this volume seeks to situate ghosts in the cultural imagination. The chapters in Popular Ghosts are united by the impulse to theorize the cultural work that ghosts do within the trans-historical contexts that comprise our understanding of everyday life. These authors study the theoretical and aesthetic genealogies of the spectral, while also commenting on the multiple everyday spaces that this category occupies. Rather than looking to a single tradition or medium, the essays in Popular Ghosts explore film, novels, photography, television, music, social practices, and political structures from different cultures to reopen the questions that surround our haunted sense of the everyday.

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, "Introduction"

I. Genealogies of the Ghost

Julian Wolfreys, "Ghosts: Of Ourselves or, Drifting with Hardy, Heidegger, James, and Woolf"

Martin Harries, "Beckett's Ghost Light"

Peter Hitchcock, "Uncanny Marxism: Or, Do Androids Dream of Electric Lenin?"

Justin Sausman, "Where are the Dead? A Genealogy of Mediumship in Victoria Glendinning's Electricity"

Colin Davis, "The Skeptical Ghost: Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and the Return of the Dead"

II. Spectral Politics of the Contemporary

Caroline Herbert, "National Hauntings: Specters of Socialism in Shree 420 and Deewar"

Georgiana Banita, "Shadow of the Colossus: The Spectral Lives of 9/11"

Esther Peeren, "Everyday Ghosts and the Ghostly Everyday in Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and Achille Mbembe"

Michael Cuntz, "The Gentle Irruption of the Hereafter in This Life: Jean Echenoz's Au piano and Robin Campillo's Les revenants"

Benjamin D'Harlingue, "Specters of the U.S. Prison Regime: Haunting Tourism and the Penal Gaze"

III. Chasing Ghosts In(to) the 21st Century

Karen Williams, "The Liveness of Ghosts: Haunting and Reality TV"

Alissa Burger, "Ghost Hunters: Simulated Participation in Televisual Hauntings"

Catherine Spooner, "The Haunted Lecture Theater: Ghosts in the Academy in the BBC's Sea of Souls"

IV. Other Ghostly Spheres

Arno Meteling, "Genius Loci: Memory, Media, and the Neo-Gothic in Georg Klein and Elfriede Jelinek"

Christine Wilson, "Haunted Habitability: Wilderness and American Haunted House Narratives"

Bruno Lessard, "Gothic Affects: Digitally Haunted Houses and the Production of Affect-Value"

Alla Gadassik, "Ghosts in the Machine: The Body in Digital Animation"

Pamela Thurschwell, "The Ghost Worlds of Adolescence"

V. Ambient Ghosts: Spectral Images, Sounds, and Bodies

María del Pilar Blanco, "The Haunting of the Everyday in the Thoughtographs of Ted Serios"

Anthony Hutchison, "'Following the Ghost': The Psychogeography of Alternative Country"

Isabella van Elferen, "Haunted by a Melody: Ghosts, Transgression, and Music in Twin Peaks"

Sean Somers, "Occultic Inscriptions: The Modern Ghost-Tattoo in Japan, from Kyôsai to Horiyoshi III"

Selected Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index