The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the 'spectral turn'

Textual Practice

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 527-546

  Luckhurst, Roger ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Deconstruction; Derrida; Gothic; London; Spectres

Indexed keywords

EID: 30944440163     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360210163336     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Rupert Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), pp. 9 and 375.
2. Patrick McGrath and Bradford Morrow (eds), The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (London: Picador, 1991), p. xii.
3. Davenport-Hines, Gothic, p. 346.
4. Peggy Kamuf, 'Translating specters: an interview with Peggy Kamuf ', Parallax 7:3 (2001), p. 45. I would include myself as a minor member of this band, having contributed to collections on ghosts, the Gothic and Derrida in the 1990s. I note this not as a narcissist, but as someone who can cast no stones: any critique undertaken by this essay is an auto-critique too.
5. Martin Jay, 'The uncanny nineties', in Cultural Semantics: Key words of our Time (London: Athlone Press, 1998), p. 157.
6. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), p. 183.
7. Marcello Truzzi, 'Definition and dimensions of the occult: towards a sociological persepective', Journal of Popular Culture 5:2 (1971-2), p. 638.
8. For some commentary on these groupings, see Peter Barry, 'Revisionings of London in three contemporary poets: Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher, and Aidan Dun', in Holger Klein (ed.), Poetry Now: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry in the Making (Tubingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1999), and
9. Robert Sheppard's review of Sinclair's anthology Conductors of Chaos in 'Elsewhere and everywhere: other new (British) poetries', Critical Survey 10:1 (1998), pp. 17-32.
10. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell, Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts (London: Knockabout, 1999).
11. Iain Sinclair, Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales (London: Paladin, 1991), p. 143. All further page references in parentheses in the text.
12. Michael Moorcock, London Bone (London: Scribner, 2001).
13. Patrick Wright, A Journey through the Ruins: The Last Days of London (London: Radius, 1991), p.12.
14. Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), pp. 661 and 141. All further page references in parentheses in the text.
15. Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), pp. 8 and 25.
16. See e.g. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock on the 'crisis of terminology' for the contemporary city in 'From "Great Town" to "Nonplace Urban Realm": reading the modern city', in Sharpe and Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 1.
17. Wolfreys, Writing London, pp. 204-5.
18. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone, 1999), pp. 17-18.
19. M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 28-9.
20. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 3.
21. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 108.
22. Jean-François Lyotard, 'About the human', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 2.
23. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. xviii and xxi.
24. David Glover, 'The "spectrality effect" in early modernism', in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (eds), Gothic Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 29-43.
25. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993), pp. 72 and 69.
26. Maureen Perkins, The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity (London: Pluto, 2001).
27. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 74-5.
28. Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (London: Headline Publishing, 2000), pp. 235-6.
29. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 8.
30. Wright, A Journey through the Ruins, p. 12.
31. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p.24.
32. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
33. For commentary on the 'ghosted' subject in Nadja, see Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1993) and
34. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, 'André Breton's ghostly stance', pp. 42-66.
35. For original documents, see The Situationist International: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (New York: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989).
36. Stewart Home, Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997), pp. 29-32.
37. Jenny Turner, 'Aberdeen Rocks' [Review of Stewart Home, 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess], London Review of Books (9 May 2002), p. 38.
38. Stewart Home, The House of Nine Squares: Letters on Neoism, Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation (London: Nine Squares, 1997).
39. LPA document, cited in Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 165. Home has extended these investigations into an overheated pulp fiction about sex magic and London topography in Come Before Christ and Murder Love (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).
40. Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta, 1997), p. 26.
41. Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 113.
42. See Iain Sinclair, 'The mystery of the disappearing room', in Downriver, and Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky's Room (London: Granta, 1999), perhaps particularly '"Mobile invisibility": Golems, Dybbuks and unanchored presences', pp.171-200.
43. Sinclair, Downriver, p. 265.
44. Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), pp. 6 and 26.
45. Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, 'The "moderns" and their ghosts', pp. 216-33.
46. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 7.
47. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 161.
48. Jay, 'The uncanny nineties', p. 162.
49. Nicholas Royle, 'Phantom Review' [Review of Specters of Marx], Textual Practice 11:2 (1997), p. 387.
50. Kate Soper, 'The limits of hauntology', in 'Spectres of Derrida: Symposium', Radical Philosophy 75 (January/February 1996).
51. For other Marxist responses see Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999)
52. and the special issue of Parallax entitled 'A New International?' 7:3 (2001).
53. John Fletcher, 'Marx the uncanny: ghosts and their relation to the mode of production', Radical Philosophy 75 (1996). Fletcher concludes by arguing that 'the ghost in Hamlet is different from the tropes of spectrality in Marx, [and] this difference dramatizes issues of the epochal and the historical that are foreclosed and misrecognized by Derrida's transcendental "hauntology"' (p. 36). (One might disagree with the characterization of hauntology as 'transcendental' here, but Fletcher's point remains a powerful one.)
54. Jacques Derrida, 'Marx & Sons', in Ghostly Demarcations, p. 248.
55. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158.
56. Chris Baldick, 'Introduction', in Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xxi.
57. See Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and
58. some of the contributions to Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Geography of the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
59. See also Margot Backas, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
60. Citation from David Punter, 'Heart lands: contemporary Scottish Gothic', Gothic Studies 1:1 (1997), p. 101.
61. Christopher Fowler, Darkest Day (London: Warner Books, 1993), p. 223. All further references in parentheses in the text.
62. Christopher Fowler, Disturbia (London: Warner Books, 1997), p. 3.
63. Citation from 1983 White Paper, Streamlining the Cities (October 1983).
64. quoted in 'London after the GLC: an editorial foreword', London Journal 10-11 (1984-5), p. 6.
65. Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 61.
66. Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao, Governing London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 50.
67. Will Hutton, The State We're In (rev. edn London: Vintage, 1996), p. 28.
68. See William F. Kahl, The Development of London Livery Companies (Boston, MA: Baker Library, 1960).
69. Ranald C. Michie, The City of London: Continuity and Change, 1850-1990 (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 10.
70. Alexandra Warwick, 'Lost cities: London's apocalypse', in Spectral Readings, p. 84.
71. Janet Foster, Docklands: Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision (London: UCL Press, 1999), p. 229.
72. Bill Schwarz, 'Where horses shit a hundred sparrows feed: Docklands and East London during the Thatcher years', in John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (eds), Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 90.
73. David Owen, The Government of London 1855-89: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
74. See Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London 1889-1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995).
75. There are also useful contributions on the LCC era in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman-Jones (eds), Metropolis - London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989).
76. See Gareth Stedman-Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) and
77. Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
78. For selections of contemporary documents, see 'Outcast London', in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History 1880-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 25-51.
79. Frederic Harrison, 'London in 1887', in The Meaning of History and Other Historical Pieces (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 435.
80. James Cantlie, Degeneration Amongst Londoners (London: Field & Tuer, 1885).
81. Sidney Low, 'The Rise of the suburbs', Contemporary Review 60 (1891), p. 550.
82. Sidney Webb, The London Programme (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), pp. 4 and v.
83. Sidney Webb, 'The work of the London County Council', Contemporary Review 67 (1895), p. 130.
84. Pimlott and Rao, Governing London, p. 87.
85. For a rapid response to these farcical events see M. D'Arcy and R. MacLean, Nightmare: The Race to Become London's Mayor (London: Politico's, 2000).
86. Arthur Machen, 'Science and the ghost story', Literature (17 September 1898), p. 251.
87. Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (London: Martin Secker, 1924), pp. 77-8.
88. See esp. Thomas Burke, Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown (London: Grant Richards, 1917), and for London lost to the regulative interference of the Defence of the Realm Act his Out and About: A Notebook of London in Wartime (1919). I am indebted here to Anne Witchard's as yet unpublished work on Burke's fantasy Limehouse for these points.
89. Georg Simmel, 'The sociology of secrecy and secret societies', American Journal of Sociology 11: 4 (1906), p. 472.
90. Philip Norman, London Vanished and Vanishing (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1905);
91. Peter Bushell, London's Secret History (London: Constable, 1983);
92. J.A. Brooks, Ghosts of London, 2 vols (Norwich: Jarrold, 1982).