The Ghost in Contemporary french Narrative (1975-2005)

French literary narrative of the last three decades is peopled by a surprising number of significant ghosts. Contemporary French writers have been preoccupied to a point of near-obsession with spectral figures - the ghost, phantom and apparition, the revenant, the double, and the quasi-religious zombie. Across a whole range of writers, otherwise diverse in preoccupation and style, these spectral figures indicate a veritable paradigm. In seeking to account for this phenomenon, which has so far attracted little critical attention, this project proposes two distinct, but related lines of inquiry. The first will examine the function of the ghost in relation to contemporary French fiction`s obsessive representation of recent history (the traumas of the world wars, the decolonisation period, the collapse of communism), hypothesising that the ghost device serves to bring back, or to maintain in public consciousness, issues that have remained essentially unresolved. The second will explore another common trope of this corpus, namely the writing of identities. In this case, ghosts will be approached as expressions of the writers` questioning or definition of their identities, in relation to personal life situations (modern industrial working conditions, the death of a loved one, illness), as well as recent historical events and developments.