The works of Carlos Fuentes are well known for their thematics of History, how the past continues to influence the present despite mechanisms of historical omission, oblivion, or repression. This dissertation offers a spectral reading of a selection of Fuentes’ works—La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Cambio de piel (1967), Terra nostra (1975), and Una familia lejana (1980)—that represents his vision of Mexican, Latin American, and Transatlantic history. A spectral reading refers to the hidden or indirect ways that the past continues to manifest in the present as specters, ghosts—unconscious and unwitting remembrances of repressed or unknown material that elude conscious recollection but continue nonetheless to linger and impede healthy progress. Concepts from trauma theory and psychoanalysis thus provide a framework for this critical approach. Fuentes’ representations of history often comprise violent events that resonate as ghostly presences haunting contemporary society. Our reading makes use of concepts such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s “crypt” and “phantom” as well as Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” in order to show how historical traumas and violent events are transmitted across generations as a spectral inheritance. Through this theoretical lens, a spectral reading sheds new light upon Carlos Fuentes’ use of cyclical time, doubling, narrative experimentation, and intertextuality that function together to represent the effects of violent history as a spectral legacy on individual, family, national, regional, and global scales. The works studied in this dissertation’s six chapters represent distinct moments of Fuentes’ narrative production. Despite the works’ various forms of representation—realist, Gothic, modern, postmodern—, their common thread is the timeless burden of historical violence and trauma. Fuentes presents a pessimistic vision of the ways in which contemporary society ineffectively bears or disavows this burden. The works thus show a possibility for embracing the Other and engaging in the task of working through trauma, although this potential reconciliation remains constantly thwarted. History, according to Fuentes, remains trapped in a purgatory of violence. Yet the hope can be gleaned, however, that the reader may take up this healing labor. While full reconciliation continues to elude us, engagement with the ghosts of the past is a healthy first step.

This paper aims to investigate the possible connection between specters and silence in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016). In both novels, the protagonists predominantly speak in interior monologues, recounting the memories and secrets that haunt them, in what could be construed as an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of their past. The paper’s understanding of specters is based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), and the idea that specters - as figures that exist in states of in-between - disrupt not only temporality, but what we know to be true. Much like specters, the protagonists vacillate between states, neither speaking nor remaining silent, as they address absent or imagined listeners. This undecidability leaves one to wonder if their ghosts are - or ever can be - truly exorcised.

Ce mémoire est une lecture hantologique du roman The Double Hook de Sheila Watson. Une telle lecture accorde une importance particulière aux fantômes et aux spectres qui se trouvent dans un texte ou qui le hantent. La hantologie étant un mouvement de pensée introduit par Jacques Derrida dans Spectres de Marx, cet ouvrage de Derrida se veut à la fois un point de départ et un site important de mon analyse auquel je retourne tout au long de ce mémoire. De plus, à travers les écrits de plusieurs spécialistes de la littérature canadienne-anglaise tels que Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner et Cynthia Sugars, ce mémoire explore ce que le roman de Watson permet de découvrir à propos de ce qui hante l’imaginaire collectif canadien. Dans une première partie de ce mémoire, je concentre mon analyse sur les spectres textuels qui hantent les pages du roman de Watson. Les mythes autochtones, les récits chrétiens, les conventions du ‘Western’ et du roman régional, ainsi que les traces de plusieurs textes modernistes, semblent hanter la structure du roman et l’utilisation du langage qui crée l’histoire présentée par Watson. Dans le deuxième chapitre de ce mémoire, mon analyse se tourne vers les fantômes et les personnages fantomatiques qui existent dans le monde fictionnel créé par Watson. Les personnages tels que la mère de la famille Potter et Coyote sont fréquemment associés aux tropes du gothique et lus comme étant des spectres et ce sont de telles lectures qui ponctuent mon analyse de cet important roman. / This thesis consists of a study of haunting, both at the textual and fictional level, in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. In this hauntology of the novel, I explore the texts and cultural archetypes that haunt Watson’s novel as well as the ghosts, spectral figures, and haunting spaces and places represented in the novel. The theoretical movement of hauntology introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx is a fundamental work in contemporary studies of the tropes of the Gothic and of a more generalized haunting that threatens notions of stability in our understanding of existence. Moreover, the haunting figures and texts in Watson’s novel subvert the heterogenous conception of a national discourse in Canada. The insights provided by scholars such as Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner, and Cynthia Sugars, who are concerned with what Watson’s use of spectral figures in her narrative accomplishes in relation to writing the settler-colonizer nation of Canada, contribute to informing my argument about the place Watson’s novel occupies in the Canadian collective imaginary. In the first chapter of this thesis, I focus on the textual hauntings in the pages of Watson’s novel. Indigenous myths, Christian rituals, conventions of the western and regional novel, and modernist texts haunt the novel’s structure, content, and the language that constitutes it. In the second chapter of this thesis, I direct my attention towards the haunting and haunted figures that exist in the world created by Watson. In both chapters, my goal is to converse with the specters I see in the novel, to give a voice to what is not explicitly said and to find what lies between the fragments of Watson’s experimental prose.

This thesis explores the sense and the implications of the messianicity without messianism, a quasi-concept coined by the thinker Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in the 1990s that refers to a “structure of experience” characterized by a lack of conclusion. On the one hand, this thesis examines the role that this notion plays within the vast work of Derrida; it aims at demonstrating that it neither indicates a rupture nor it constitutes a mere reformulation of his previous postulates. On the other hand, it establishes a dialogue between this quasi-concept and the use that a number of authors of the XXth century and the beginning of the XXIst, from different contexts and interests, do of the messianic tradition in order to formulate their own understandings of history, linguistics, politics and ethics. This thesis goes in depth into the shortcomings of the proposals of these authors and claims that the messianicity without messianism avoids many of them and offers a more fertile model for describing reality and acting in it. The final aim is to contribute to the reception of this quasi-concept ―which, in our opinion, so far has been slanted and insufficient― and prove that it rescues us from both the risks of the fundamentalisms and those of the paralyzing “everything goes” brought about by the phenomenon of the death of God. / Esta tesis explora el sentido y las implicaciones de la mesianicidad sin mesianismo, un casi-concepto acuñado por el pensador Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) en los años noventa del siglo XX que alude a una “estructura general de la experiencia” caracterizada por la ausencia de conclusión. Por un lado, esta tesis examina el papel que dicha noción desempeña dentro de la vasta obra de Derrida; quiere demostrar que ni supone una ruptura en su obra ni se trata de una mera reformulación de postulados anteriores. Por el otro, establece un diálogo entre este casi-concepto y el uso que una serie de autores del siglo XX e inicios del XXI, desde contextos e intereses distintos, hacen de la tradición mesiánica para formular sus propias concepciones de la historia, la lingüística, la política y la ética. Esta tesis ahonda en las limitaciones de las propuestas de estos autores y defiende que la mesianicidad sin mesianismo evita muchas de ellas y ofrece un modelo más fértil para describir la realidad e intervenir en ella. Todo ello con la voluntad de contribuir a la recepción de este casi-concepto ―que consideramos que, hasta el momento, ha sido sesgada e insuficiente― y mostrar que nos rescata de los riesgos tanto de los fundamentalismos como del paralizante “todo vale” acarreado por el fenómeno de la muerte de Dios.