A collection of poems.

Corpses and disappeared bodies have become part of the Mexican landscape. Within the overall increase of violence, feminicide has become an urgent matter. Around ten women are murdered each day and most cases remain unsolved. As a response to this spectacle of violence, feminist protests and organized action are gaining prominence throughout the country. ‘Vivas nos queremos’ (‘We want to stay alive’) and ‘Ni una menos’ (‘Not one less’) are some of the chants that resonate among massive protests. Despite the growing numbers of feminicide cases and with the spread of activism, there is surprisingly little research that examines the affects and emotions engendered in the current normalization of violence. Much has been said about feminicide in relation to symbolic violence, and patriarchal structures, but not enough focus has been placed on how living bodies affect and are affected by their contact with the dead. Thus, this project utilizes affect theories (Brian Massumi, 2002) and the language of haunting (Avery F. Gordon, 2008) to unpack the complexity of feminicide, collective mourning, and normalization of violence. Through a close reading of literary fiction, I explore the affective forces engendered between living bodies and dead bodies. By thinking with Massumi and Gordon, I posit that theorizing affective forces should not assume a sharp cut between life and death. Then I follow the ghost of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) as her wails become the voice of grieving mothers and murdered women. Listening to La Llorona’s wails as they mingle with activists’ chants of resistance makes visible, audible, and palpable a larger haunting that hints towards unequal social structures. Thinking with the concepts of mourning and grief as well as affect and haunting opens new ways of thinking about the unresolved murders and disappearances of women as expressed by literature and artivism. / Graduate

“The Chart of Some Place” explores grief, loss, loneliness through the lens of poetry. Split into four sections, like different stages of grief, the poems in each section represent different eras of the speakers life. The “Place” that is referred throughout is in reference to a small farming town in Utah. The relationships built throughout a span of three years and an abrupt separation led to reminiscent grief and an abundance of lost love and friendship.

This dissertation examines the ways in which torture was imagined and narrated in Guatemalan literature during the Internal Armed Conflict. For nearly four decades, Guatemala suffered one of the longest and most violent wars in Latin America. During that time, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people were tortured at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Torture, as suggested by Ariel Dorman, is most fundamentally “a crime committed against the imagination” (8), disrupting and often dissolving the boundaries between fact and fiction, the real and the unreal. The Introduction and Chapter One of this study explore the destabilization of this boundary by examining the historical and theoretical context for torture in Guatemala. The ubiquity and normality of torture was so terrible that, for many, it became “unspeakable”—an atrocity that defied language. Chapters Two through Four study three different literary modes of countering the state’s rhetoric of torture, probing the possibility of narrating torture despite its seemingly unsayable nature. Examining works by Rigoberta Menchú (chapter two), Marco Antonio Flores and Arturo Arias (chapter three), and Rodrigo Rey Rosa (chapter four), and aided by current theories and studies of torture, this dissertation investigates the ways in which these Guatemalan authors have sought not only to re-present torture, but also to explore and sometimes question the possibility of bearing witness to that torture in literature.

This thesis examines spectrality in Elizabethan literature, focusing on the ghost as a figuration of disjuncture within contemporary constructions of the dead. Taking account of the cultural unease and uncertainties about the afterlife generated during the Reformation, I explore how particular conceptualizations of the dead manifest instabilities that move the figure of the ghost into the disturbing role of the spectre. The literature I examine ranges from Elizabethan translations of Seneca and key theological treatises to examples of the English revenge tragedy produced by Shakespeare, Marston, and Chettle. In drawing upon this cross-section of work, I highlight the resonances between varying forms of spectrality in order to explore ways in which the ghost incorporates, but also exceeds, the theatre’s requirement for dramatic excess. It thus becomes clear that the presence of the spectre extends beyond the immediate purposes of particular writers or genres to expose a wider disruption of the relation between, and ontologies of, the living and the dead. The theoretical apparatus for this project is drawn primarily from deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, with attention to the uncanny as an area in which the two intersect and overlap. These modes of analysis usefully highlight areas of disturbance and slippage within the linguistic and conceptual structures by which the living and dead are defined and understood. In adopting this approach, I aim to expand upon and complicate existing scholarship concerning the figure of the ghost in relation to sixteenth-century theological, philosophical, mythological, and popular discourses and traditions. I do so by demonstrating that the emergence of the uncanny arises through a culturally specific haunting of the form and language of Elizabethan treatments of the dead. The spectre thereby emerges as a figure that is as much the product as the cause of instabilities and erosion within the Elizabethan construction and containment of the dead.

This study will discuss each of Shirley Jackson's six novels. The discussions will concentrate on plot, setting, theme, characterization, and style.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

abstract: International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, I explore how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. I draw on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction which sustains particular performances of statecraft. Utilizing ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, I trace the relationship between a logic of haunting and statecraft at sites of memory in three cases. Rwandan genocide memorialization is often centered on bodies and bones, displayed as evidence of the genocide. Yet, this display invokes the specter of genocide in order to legitimate specific policymaking. Memorialization of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border offers an opportunity to explore practices that grieve ungrievable lives, and how memorialization can posit a resistance to the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. 9/11 memorialization offers an interesting case because of the way in which bodies were vanished and spaces reconfigured. Using the question of vanishing as a frame, this final case explores how statecraft is dependent on vanishing: the making absent of something so as to render something else present. Several main conclusions and implications are drawn from the cases. First, labeling certain lives as politically unqualified can sustain certain conceptualizations of the state. Second, paying attention to the way statecraft is a haunted performance, being haunted by the things we perhaps ethically should be haunted by, can re-conceptualize the way International Relations thinks about concepts such as security, citizenship, and power. Finally, memorialization, while seemingly innocuous, is really a space for political contestation that can, if done in certain ways, really implicate the high politics of security conventional wisdom. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Political Science 2012

Au delà de toute classification nosographique, il y a un caractère irréductible qui relie la dimension de l’habiter à l’humain, quelles qu’en soient ses conditions, sa structure. Parce qu’elle est intimement intriquée au corps et au langage, la question de l’habiter intéresse la psychanalyse qui, dès lors, se doit de l’envisager dans ses liens avec la folie et la norme. Que signifie habiter ? Quels territoires désigne ce verbe ? Quelles en sont ses frontières? Habiter a-t-il toujours pour horizon la constitution d’un espace circonscrit, d’un « chez-soi » ? En effet, le propre de l’exister humain n’est pas uniquement caractérisé par l’appropriation d’un territoire, par l’acquisition d’un espace privé, mais par le fait d’être toujours déjà exposé à son dehors. Nous habitons d’ailleurs ce paradoxe : chez-nous, c’est toujours hors de nous. Cet inconfort inhérent à tout habiter humain est à l’origine de nombreuses impasses cliniques dans les pratiques actuelles de réinsertion par le logement. Cette réflexion, au croisement de la philosophie, de la psychanalyse et des sciences sociales, veut questionner les frontières entre le dedans et le dehors, entre moi et l’autre, en pointant que l’habitation du sujet n’est jamais toute. « L’habitat-terrier » de Monsieur H, la « maison hantée » de Madame M et le « garde-meubles » de Monsieur C - trois déclinaisons cliniques de l’habiter - nous permettent de montrer comment l’inconscient et l’Unheimlich interrogent les catégories habituelles du familier, de l’intimité et de l’étranger. Ainsi, l’habiter ne saurait être pensé sans un rapport à la hantise. Plus précisément, ce que la hantise fait au lieu qu’on habite, c’est de lui autoriser un « hors-lieu », ce qui constitue l’essence même de l’opération psychanalytique. Dès lors, quelle serait une conception freudienne de la maison? Il s’agira de penser les modalités de l’habiter en les articulant aux questions de seuil, d’accueil et d’hospitalité, ceci afin de dégager une certaine « éthique de l’habiter ». / The bond between the questions of inhabiting and being is an inveterate one, beyond any nosographic considerations, regardless of the structure and the conditions surrounding each and every person. Inhabiting is intimately woven into the fabric of the body and of language, and is therefore of natural interest to psychoanalysis, which, in turn, is called upon to address its relationship to insanity and to the norm. What does inhabiting mean? Which territories does this term point at? What are its frontiers? Does inhabiting always pertain to a to well-defined space, of one’s own? Human existence is not only defined by the appropriation of territory, nor by the acquisition of private space, but also by the very fact of being constantly exposed to one's “outside”. Indeed, we dwell within this paradox: “our place” is forever outside of our selves. This discomfort, inherent to all human inhabiting, is at the heart of numerous clinical dead-ends, encountered by projects aiming at social inclusion through housing. Our study, at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis and social science, seeks to question the frontier between “inside” and “outside”, between myself and others, pointing out that inhabiting is never one and a whole. We will look at three clinical studies: M. H’s “burrow”, Ms. M’s “haunted house” and Mr. C’s “storage facility”. They will allow us to examine how the subconscious, and the Unheimlich put ill at ease the habitual categorization of familiarity, intimacy and the foreign. We will discover that inhabiting cannot be addressed unrelated to the concept of haunting. Indeed, it is the haunting which makes it possible for a situ to have its corresponding ex-situ, which is the very essence of the psychoanalytic process. What would then be a Freudian conception of the House? We will study the various modes of inhabiting as they pertain to the issues of the threshold, of welcoming and of hospitality, aiming at a definition of the Ethics of Inhabiting

Denna uppsats har som syfte att undersöka skräckens roll i sympatiskapande, hur denkan användas för att skapa sympati för karaktärer. För att utföra undersökningenanalyseras två karaktärer från skräckserien The Haunting of Hill House (2018), medhjälp av Jens Eders karaktärsklocka som analysmetod. Analysen visar att skräckentillför mycket till vad som gör karaktärerna sympatiska, genom att gestaltakaraktärernas känslor och problem på ett tydligt sätt. Det går att se skräckens möjligaroll som verktyg för att effektivt skapa sympati, till exempel i möjligheten att skapaen vilja hos karaktärerna som publiken kan sympatisera med.