In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea, the narrator speaks of the healing power of the Gulf in a literal manner: the waters of the Gulf of Mexico heal the wounded hands of the fisherman. The seventeen stories in the following collection examine Hemingway's concept on other levels, focusing on the human ability--or lack thereof--to bridge psychological gulfs, and to find emotional healing. Three major currents run through the lives of the characters in Gulf: difficulties in relationships, struggles with identity, and a sense of being haunted by the unexplained. As the stories progress, the healing waters of the Gulf move the characters away from chaos and toward contentment. In early stories, characters are often appalled by the discovery of their true identities; the later stories feature heroes who've found happiness and peace. Scattered throughout the book are the haunted stories, those that question the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined, what is known and what can never be understood. Gulf is informed by the landscape of the south, yet some stories venture around the world, from the Gulf of Mexico to the heather-dotted hills of Scotland, exploring themes as dark and mysterious as the Gulf itself.

Crimson Peak (2015, dir. Guillermo del Toro), often overshadowed by del Toro's more critically acclaimed filmography, deserves to be acknowledged for its central trauma metaphor and its nuanced approach to gender. Far from being merely a horror movie fueled by disturbing sequences such as those found in contemporary supernatural horror films, Crimson Peak slowly unravels how Allerdale Hall parallels the film's female leads as they house and live with ghosts, revenants of a traumatic past. This essay explores the personification of the haunted house as a metaphor for the personified trauma that resides in a woman's body using Crimson Peak as a reference point. The impact of trauma in Crimson Peak will be examined through the lens of hauntology. Following this examination will be an analysis of Crimson Peak's narrative and visuals as a depiction of trauma via haunting, identifying the connections between different spaces of the house as metaphors for trauma. Edith's submission and triumph over Lucille and the representation of patriarchal order will be explored to understand how she is able to overcome the haunting of Allerdale Hall and, by extension, the trauma endured in the female body.

This thesis is an extended reading of the topos of the ghostly as it is staged in the modernist writings of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and D.H. Lawrence. As I argue, their distinct appropriations of haunting are innately tied to their individual theories of the aesthetic; there are also a number of recurring motifs throughout their respective oeuvres, which time and again evoke a ghostly register. Consistently appearing in the texts I read here, most of which were published between the years 1919 and 1935, are figurations of the ghostly as a symptom of ‘ontological uncertainty’, as well as renderings of purgatorial subjectivity, and aporias of mourning. I locate my reading in response to the scholarly fields of haunting studies, mourning modernisms and Gothic modernisms. In a move common to contemporary theoretical studies of haunting, I draw also from the latter work of Jacques Derrida, a theoretical lens that facilitates my reading of a complex modernist ethics of mourning and alterity, one that often courts the ghostly, but resists what Derrida terms ‘hauntological’ work. The Derridean figure of the ethical apparition, in its status as the Absolute Other, is consistently complicated or rejected in these texts. This resistance mirrors a purgatorial mode of subjectivity that recurs in a range of guises in the modernisms I read here. In uncovering the economies that lie beneath these haunted subjectivities Jacques Lacan’s metapsychology of the subject helps also to conceptualise Bowen and Lawrence’s handling of the spectral. Bowen’s is a distinctly visual imagination, and her staging of a haunted subjectivity is elucidated by calling upon Lacan’s formulation of the gaze. Lawrence, whose work is consistently concerned with a-symbolic bodily registers, bypasses a number of the purgatorial aporias staged in the writings of Woolf, Eliot and Bowen. Viewing his appropriation of haunting through a Lacanian understanding of feminine jouissance suggests Lawrence’s welcoming of a radical ghostly other that may transcend the aporias of subjectivity, ethics and mourning that characterise these haunting modernisms.

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s fear of the racial and ethnic other at the edges of the empire. James’s earliest ghost stories address to the legacy of American colonialism, staging narratives of indigenous erasure and land seizure by centering hauntings around property disputes. The later ghost stories—written after James had emigrated to Britain— engage in a critique of the imperial British military and colonial power structures that systematically oppress indigenous groups in the name of the empire. These ghost stories all focus on the figure of the Western settler-colonizer and his guilt in creating hauntings; James’s living characters often realize they have been complicit in the wrongdoings that result in revenge-seeking ghosts, and this realization is more terrifying than the ghosts themselves. In this way, James's ghost stories present a means of questioning the validityof colonizer identity, and thus a means of deconstructing the binary of the Western “self” and the indigenous “other.”

This dissertation interrogates the ways in which place-based belongings are constituted through outdoor recreation. By applying material-discursive theories of rhetoric to spaces of outdoor recreation on the Colorado Plateau such as the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, rock climbing landscapes in the Navajo Nation, adventure mountain biking practices that trace a 19th century stagecoach route, and ultra running trails at Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation and on ancient trails that connect Hopi Villages, and elsewhere, I examine the affective relationships between those activities, landscapes, and cultures. Drawing on spatial and environmental rhetoric and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality, I analyze affective investments in white settler colonialism to argue that such spaces are more than recreational. The framework I have developed to better explain such spaces, Recreational Colonialism, positions outdoor recreation as the new language of colonialism. Recreational Colonialism is both a discourse and a performance that-in many ways explored in this dissertation-connect outdoor recreational discourses to a trifecta of oppressions through which white settler colonialism depends: white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

In this exploration, I examine how autoethnographers create connections and community through the metaphor of the undead in their various forms. Autoethnography allows us to write and speak about our anxieties, our impolite private issues, and what frightens us at home and at work, including aging, guilt, mortality, shame, and lost love. Through autoethnography, we connect the seen and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the understood and the unexplained, mystery and science. It provides us the opportunity to reenchant the world. Most importantly, autoethnographic writing provides us the opportunity to recognize that our fears are not ours alone but are a basis upon which we can all connect.

Il est aujourd'hui possible d'affirmer que, depuis la publication de L'Être et le Néant, s'est imposée une interprétation dominante, fondée sur la lecture de cet ouvrage, de l'ontologie de Jean-Paul Sartre. Les traces les plus marquantes de cette lecture peuvent être attribuées au travail critique de Merleau-Ponty, dont la philosophie s'est développée en partie par affinité avec la pensée sartrienne et en partie en opposition avec elle. En fait, plutôt qu'une simple opposition, la critique merleau-pontyenne opère un questionnement approfondi des principes fondamentaux de l'ontologie sartrienne, en particulier ce qui concerne le problème du dualisme. La présente thèse met en question la lecture de Merleau-Ponty -et avec elle la vision dominante plus générale qui s'est constituée de L'Être et le Néant -, en proposant une autre lecture qui vise, non pas simplement à offrir des réponses aux apories posées par l'apparent dualisme de Sartre, mais à principalement rendre possible la reprise de cette pensée d'une manière originale. Ainsi, le passage par la critique de Merleau-Ponty a signifié non pas une défense unilatérale du texte, mais plutôt une exploration des propres ambiguïtés de Sartre par d'autres chemins, indiquant une richesse peu exploitée de sa philosophie. Il a fallu alors présenter en quoi consistent les problèmes inhérents à la division établie par Sartre entre les modes d'être du pour-soi et de l'en­soi, à partir d'un déplacement des argumentations de Merleau-Ponty, et rendre manifestes les impasses révélées à la reprise de la question du dualisme en termes d'être et de néant, subjectivité et objectivité. Notre travail a consisté à démontrer qu'il y a des éléments implicites dans le texte -ou même explicites, mais non exploités -qui permettent de dépasser les difficultés posées par le dualisme. Inspirée par certaines analyses de Jacques Derrida sur les spectres, nous appelons spectralité la couche implicite de l'œuvre qui, en surgissant, ébranle la base dualiste qui paraissait la soutenir. En faisant émerger la couche spectrale, nous révélons aussi l'omniprésence et le caractère essentiel des relations de hantise, à tel point que nous comprenons l'ontologie de Sartre comme une hantologie, pour souligner la pertinence et la prédominance de telles relations. A partir de cette perspective, il est possible de voir non seulement qu'un dualisme rigide entre pour-soi et en-soi ne rend pas compte d'une multiplicité de modes d'être dans le texte sartrien, ni non plus de l'importance des relations de hantise qui garantissent l'imbrication des régions ontologiques, parfois considérées comme incompatibles. Cette lecture démontre finalement qu'un mode de présence non intuitive des spectres ébranle la supposée "pureté" lumineuse de la conscience qui s'est établie comme paradigme du sujet sartrien, dans la mesure où la hantise démontre un type singulier d'opacité qui finalement inscrit le sujet dans le monde et obscurcit sa relation à soi. / Today, it's possible to affirm that, since the publication of Being and Nothingness (L 'Être et le Néant), a certain reading based on this work has consolidated and established itself as the dominant interpretative view over Jean-Paul Sartre's ontology. This reading's most remarkable traces can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty's critical work, whose philosophy has developed in part because of an affinity which, at the same time, claimed for an opposition to Sartre's thinking. Merleau-Ponty's critical view, however, cannot actually be described as a simple opposition, since it leads to the deeper questioning of aspects which form the groundwork of Sartre's ontology, specially concerning the problem of dualism. This thesis calls into question Merleau­Ponty's reading - as well as the more general dominant view that has formed about L 'Être et le Néant - while proposing another interpretation, which does not aim at simply offering answers to the resulting aporias of Sartre' s apparent dualism, but primarily at amplifying the possibility to return to such line of thought through an original path. Thus, going over Merleau-Ponty's critical view did not mean defending a text has a single meaning; though it did suggest that Sartre's ambiguities could be worked with in other ways, indicating a seldom explored depth in his philosophical thinking. It was then necessary to explain the division established by Sartre between the modes of being For-itself and Being- in-itself, and its inherent problems. Moreover, after the displacement of Merleau-Ponty's arguments, it was essential to highlight the impasses revealed when reconsidering the issue of dualism in terms of being and nothingness, subjectivity and objectivity. Our work consisted in demonstrating there are implicit - or even explicit, but unexplored - elements in the text which allow us to surpass the difficulties created by the dualism. By way of an inspiration caused by a few analyses of specters by Jacques Derrida, we refer to spectrality as the implicit layer, which might arise from the work, undermining the dualistic basis seemingly supporting it. By making the spectral layer emerge, we also reveal the omnipresence and the essential character of the haunting (hantise) relations, to the point of understanding Sartre's ontology as an hauntology, and stressing the significance and predominance of such relations. From this perspective, it is possible to observe not only that a rigid dualism between the For-itself and the in Being-in-itself cannot encompass the multiple modes of being present in Sartre 's work, but also the relevance of the haunting relations as those which guarantee the imbrication of the ontological regions, at times taken as incompatible. Finally, this reading demonstrates how a spectral mode of non-intuitive presence disrupts the supposed luminous "purity" of conscience which bas stablished itself as a paradigm of Sartre's view of the subject, insofar as the haunting shows a unique kind of opacity which ultimately inscribes the subject in the world and overshadows his relationship to himself.

The Holocaust and post-war anti-Semitism-propelled migration changed the face of Poland, a country that for centuries has been the heartland of the Jewish diaspora. Remnants of the Polish Jewry that did not emigrate, regardless of whether they considered themselves Poles, Poles of Jewish descent or Polish Jews, often felt fearful about speaking of their ancestry, let alone acting upon it. Jewish organizations and social life did not disappear, but religious congregations in particular gradually diminished in number and activity. Post-socialist Poland has become an arena of profound transformation of Jewish communal life, fostered by stakeholders with distinct agendas and resources: empowered and politically emancipated Jewish Religious Communities, now-marginalized secular organizations of the communist era, a nascent generation of Polish Jewish activists and volunteers, and transnational Jewish non-governmental organizations. My thesis explores Polish Jewish communal life and experiences of being and becoming Jewish. It is a study after the ‘revival’, but revealing its looming presence in unsolved predicaments over a Jewish future, global structural dependencies, and temporal dynamics of programs of socialization. I argue that the post-socialist reality not only witnessed the coming of a new Polish Jewish generation, but also the emergence of a new sociality, shaped in two decades of continuous friction between ontologies, agendas and hopes originating in different locations within, and on different scales of, the Polish Jewish contemporaneity. This new Polish Jewish reality invites us to rethink the impact of globalization on the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, and also offers a new perspective on the role of global NGOs in the contemporary world.

Using adaptation and queer theory, this essay discusses and analyzes how Henry James’ horror novella The Turn of the Screw has been adapted into a streaming show for Netflix. By showing how The Haunting of Bly Manor removes some of the ambiguity of the original text, this essay claims that the show does not fall victim to the “bury your gays” trope, as it has been accused of. Instead, this essay finds that while the show may not perpetuate this trope, it still maintains the idea that queer stories come with tragic backstories and trauma.

This study seeks to describe what I term the ethics of haunting, as related to trauma and memory, by analyzing Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. It does not claim to be representative of ghosts and haunting as a whole, but more specifically to illustrate various manners in which the return of the ghost and its subsequent haunting are motivated by an ethics of memory in Rulfo's novel. Within this framework I explore remembrance as a medium of exchange between the living and the dead, haunting as a method by which gaps in the historical archive can be filled, and the psychoanalytic notion of incorporation as way to remember the ghost.