| dc.description.abstract | This critical essay investigates the hauntings that occur in the novel Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss, and argues that Ghostly Matters, a sociology text by Avery Gordon, provides a useful framework for why ghosts and haunting matter so greatly in literature and in understanding trauma. I seek to address the following research questions: 1) What is the role of haunting and ghosts in third-generation post-Shoah literary narratives? 2) What devices has Krauss elected to use to address not just the effects of intergenerational trauma itself, but the complicated narratives surrounding it? 3) How does a methodology of heeding our haunting and confronting our ghosts through our writing—often in works of autofiction—help illuminate a kind of awareness that has the potential to transform our trauma? 4) What is the relationship of haunting to justice? How might we speculate about what the endeavor of writing about our hauntings, and interrogating our inherited narratives, could offer to our social and political worlds? I present Krauss’s novel as a useful case study to explore the many kinds of conscious and unconscious literary choices that Jewish writers make in their work to address the legacy of traumatic hauntings, and highlight the intricate relationships between the Uncanny, hauntology, psychoanalysis, and knowledge production. Haunting is crucially epistemological, because the kind of knowledge we may gain from confronting our ghosts through writing may lead to a transformative recognition, or a reckoning, which opens a possibility for a kind of transcendence and healing. I argue that writing autofiction, or engaging with autofictional elements to investigate what our ghosts have to say, can be a productive method to not only aid in the alleviation of symptoms of our own trauma, but also a unique tool to inform social justice practices. | en_GB |
