David Coughlan | University of Limerick (original) (raw)

Books by David Coughlan

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work... more Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016

Journal Special Issues by David Coughlan

Journal Articles by David Coughlan

Parallax, Mar 2016

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), this essay argues, can be understood in the context... more Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), this essay argues, can be understood in the context of Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Of particular significance is Freud’s interest in the figure of Oedipus as one who solves riddles, or reads, because The Unconsoled is a text which is concerned also with the act of reading. This essay, following Pietro Pucci’s line that Oedipus’s life as a result of the prophecy is governed by both telos and tukhê, shows that Ishiguro’s novel exposes the ways in which the narrative order in the line of the text depends on the intervention of chance to preserve its apparently natural progression towards a determined end. These interventions manifest in the novel as a series of uncanny repetitions, the textual equivalent of the crossroad where, in a chance encounter, Oedipus slays his father. The crossroad, ensuring that what is fated comes to pass, seems to serve the death-drive by guaranteeing that the authored text becomes a death sentence. However, this paper finds that, at the crossroad, not only is the fated and death-defined narrative preserved, but a twin lineage is also generated by life-giving chance, so that birth and death do not occur only “in the beginning” and at “the end” of Ishiguro’s novel. What emerges instead is a figure of the reader as one who is created and who creates. The reader is both that which is written, like Fate, and dies with the text which authors it, and that which lives to ensure that what once was written is written again.

ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Aug 2015

The comic book writer Grant Morrison has addressed the question of the animal repeatedly througho... more The comic book writer Grant Morrison has addressed the question of the animal repeatedly throughout his career, most notably in The Filth, WE3, and the earlier series which is the focus of this paper, Animal Man. Given that comic’s clear engagement with the theme of animal rights, it is odd, as Marc Singer notes, that critics have largely analysed it only as metafiction. This article seeks to readdress this, with particular reference to Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am and David Herman’s work on the representation of animal experience in graphic narratives. It might be expected that Animal Man would provide an example of “how the representation of what it is like for (nonhuman) characters to experience events is shaped by medium-specific properties of graphic narratives” (Herman), but Morrison and artist Chas Truog seem unwilling or unable to exploit the multimodality of comic narratives to deliver an exploration of animals’ worlds. Instead, it emerges, it is exactly Morrison’s use of metafiction which provides his most profound insights into animal experience and animal suffering, because the path which leads to Animal Man’s discovery that he is a comic book character also renders him powerless, and deprives him, like the animal, of speech, an experience of death, mourning, technics, laughter, and crying. This article concludes, therefore, that Morrison’s series dramatises what living is for animals and humans, and exemplifies what Derrida describes as the radical “possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower” as Animal Man becomes Animot Man.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, 2016

Parallax, Mar 2016

ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Aug 2015

Derrida Today, Nov 2012

"The question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. T... more "The question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the ﬁrst words spoken in DeLillo’s text, ‘I want to say something but what’, a quasi-question directed to Lauren by her husband Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of ‘what’, or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an ‘inﬁnite remove’, even if it is one’s self.
It is Rey’s suicide, and Lauren’s subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo’s phrase within the context of Derrida’s efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren’s question, ‘What am I supposed to say?’ Derrida replies, ‘Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence’. Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo’s work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered."

College Literature, 2011

Jonathan Lethem’s long-evident interest in comics, for example in his 2003 novel The Fortress of ... more Jonathan Lethem’s long-evident interest in comics, for example in his 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude, culminated in his 2008 reworking of Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’s 1976 comic book series from Marvel Comics, Omega: The Unknown. Demonstrating that Lethem’s self-conscious paraphrasing of the prior series is part of a sustained examination of repetitions and relations, this essay shows how the serial nature of comics enables Lethem to address themes of families, legacies, and communities, both in this comics work and in his earlier novel also. It will be argued that The Fortress of Solitude and Omega: The Unknown together read the repeating-but-differing images of the comic book in contrast with the repetitions of the franchised brand to present a sustained critique of capitalist cultures. In all of this, it will be seen, Lethem draws on the idioms and traits of comic books: colours, panels, word balloons, margins, gutters, lines.

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Jan 1, 2008

This paper examines the connections between Thomas Pynchon’s V. and the work of W. B. Yeats, focu... more This paper examines the connections between Thomas Pynchon’s V. and the work of W. B. Yeats, focussing on the chapter “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral,” and arguing that it is not only Yeats as poet, but also Yeats as mage, that concerns Pynchon. It will be shown what part is played in “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral” by the concepts developed by Yeats in his works Per Amica Silentia Lunae and A Vision: the symbol of interlocking gyres, the twenty-eight phases, the Great Wheel, and the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, which is a shared mind housing the memories of the living and the dead. It will be argued that in the course of the chapter, which also draws closely on two poems by Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children,” Pynchon uses the destruction of the Maltese city of Valletta firstly to both represent and criticise the artifice of Yeats’s Byzantium, where life is abstracted into the fixed forms of art, and, secondly, to recast Yeats’s Soul of the World as a textual realm open to and changing with the demands and experiences of the present. In the play of his child-poets, who move between life and death, aboveground and underground, Pynchon reveals an artistic practice not bound to or limited by the images of the past, but actively producing our memories of the future.

Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, Jan 1, 2006

In adapting Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story City of Glass as a graphic novel, Paul Karas... more In adapting Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story City of Glass as a graphic novel, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli succeeded in producing a visual translation of an often non-visual text. Focussing on Auster’s text rather than Auster’s story, it is argued, the artists make inventive use of visual metaphors, visual styles, and comic conventions to translate Auster’s words into pictures. The text’s investigation into, and interrogation of, language is brought to bear on the comic version’s own visual language, and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel emerges as valuable source material for a future poetics of comics.

Frankfurter Kunstverein.Hefte, Aug 2000

More Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, 2020

Adaptation is a form of hypertextuality, wherein an original source text (the hypotext) is transf... more Adaptation is a form of hypertextuality, wherein an original source text (the hypotext) is transformed or imitated by a later text (the hypertext) (Genette 1997 [1982]). An adaptation is a massive and officially stated (Genette 1997 [1982]) or deliberate, announced, and extended transcoding of another text (Hutcheon 2006). The word “adaptation” refers both to the hypertext produced by the simple or indirect transformation of the hypotext and to the process of creation and reception of the hypertext. Following Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation (2006), this essay will consider the produced hypertext as a transposition of the hypotext, which involves a shift in medium, genre, and/or context; it will consider the process of creation, which means reinterpreting the hypotext; and it will consider the process of reception, which reads the hypertext as an intertext (see also Sanders 2006). The essay will read Leopold Maurer’s graphic novel Miller & Pynchon (2012; first published in German in 2009) as an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon (1997). Recognizing and reading a text as an adaptation means reading it in relation to another text that it repeats but does not replicate. Reading Maurer’s Miller & Pynchon as an adaptation from prose literature to comics literature helps us to understand transmediation, which is the process of transposing a work from one medium (in this case, associated with “telling”) to another (in this case, associated with “telling and showing”). An awareness of Miller & Pynchon as a creative adaptation also results in an understanding and interpretation of the text informed by perceived similarities with and differences from Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.

Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance: Critical Essays, Jul 27, 2015

The Filth, written by Grant Morrison, with art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine, is about how “th... more The Filth, written by Grant Morrison, with art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine, is about how “the shabbiest, shittiest life you can live,” one defined and limited by shame, guilt, fear, hatred, and loneliness, “can be redeemed into glory by the power of imagination,” says Morrison. The comic’s hero, seemingly, is Ned Slade, a high-ranking officer of the “supercleansing” operation The Hand, whose off-duty persona is Greg Feely, a single man addicted to pornography and accused of paedophilia, but fiercely dedicated to his cat Tony’s well-being. Slade and the other characters of The Filth allow Morrison to reinvent familiar elements of the comic book superhero narrative, especially the double identity and its relation to conceptions of masculinity. Generally structured so as to suggest that strength in the masculine public sphere is the truest sign of manhood and that a home life is only compensation for the man who has failed, at the same time a secret life of sexually-charged superheroism can be read as an expression of a sense of male shame and inadequacy. In The Filth, as its name suggests, Morrison studies the interactions of perversion and policing and, in the process, the superhero’s part in redeeming male shame. Shifting between worlds of differing scales and dimensions, he subjects readers to what he calls a “healing inoculation of grime” which, by requiring them to comprehend incompatible narrative possibilities which destabilise categories of hero and villain, male and female, or reality and fantasy, seeks to provoke that leap of the imagination into glory.

Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace, Mar 31, 2015

This essay reads the short stories of David Foster Wallace’s 1999 collection Brief Interviews wit... more This essay reads the short stories of David Foster Wallace’s 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as ethical problems and declarations of love which are intended to affect the reader deeply, even as they struggle with the misconceptions of language, the risk of sincerity, and the inexpressibility of an original story of love.

Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture: Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home, Jan 1, 2009

Comic book superheroes often display dual identities, which they dress in contrasting ways. Weari... more Comic book superheroes often display dual identities, which they dress in contrasting ways. Wearing an identifying costume, they are superheroes, fighting evil and saving the world; out of costume, and wearing instead their civilian identity, they try to live a normal life. Clothes, then, make them a ‘man’ (and it is male superheroes who are the focus of this paper), but it is only in costume that the man can be ‘super’. The comic book hero, colourfully costumed, but to all intents and purposes visually naked, displays his power and sense of invulnerability, while at the same time hiding the secret identity which is his greatest weakness, because it means a world where the hero is as powerless as his innocent family and friends. For the sake of those he loves, therefore, the comic book hero ironically removes himself from the familial, communal, and even legal worlds he has sworn to protect. The effect of this is to preserve for the, predominantly male, reader the stereotypical and simplified power fantasies so often fostered by superhero stories, where any failings or shortcomings in the domestic sphere are compensated for in a secret world of heroic achievement, despite the fact that the defining qualities of the hero’s costumed world, the secrecy, subterfuge, violence, and intimidation, are at odds with, if not a betrayal of, the values of his home-life. This raises the question of how the superhero relates to the domestic, and what it means to be a superhero at home. This essay argues that the costumed form of the comic book superhero embodies a dominant masculinity which is identified in opposition to all things feminine, including the domestic. However, it will be argued that this apparent exclusion of the domestic can be reinterpreted as an exclusion from the domestic. The hero ultimately removes himself from the home because he cannot trust himself not to harm his family, given the violence that defines him as a man.

Space, haunting, discourse, Jan 1, 2008

Paul Auster has written of ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitu... more Paul Auster has written of ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitude, where he wrote of the dead father and of the writer son. His works, however, are not about writers and ghosts, but about writers as ghosts.

Auster’s writers haunt two locations, the city and the room, uncanny places. Alone in labyrinthine cities, Auster’s characters tend to lose themselves unless they follow others, shadowing their subjects in a doubling which is, initially, a reading of the other’s passage, but then, inevitably, a re-writing of a path which is their own. As Derrida describes in “Perjuries” (speaking of trying to be faithful to those writers he follows like an acolyte), writing about, or for, another person, ghost writing so to speak, means an inevitable betrayal. But what does this mean for those who follow in mourning, as Auster’s characters do? Alone in the room, as in their lives, Auster’s characters give themselves over to the text, and become ghosts writing, uncannily undead or buried alive.

This essay analyses the significance of ghostly writing, taking place in cities and rooms, as a recurring theme in Auster’s work, arguing that, through this, Auster theorises on the nature of reading and writing as ethical practices related to the past, to mourning, to betrayal, and responsibility.

Spaces and Crossings: Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond, Jan 1, 2001

The Visual-Narrative Matrix: Interdisciplinary Collisions and Collusions, 2000

This essay discusses the works of Canadian artist Nathalie Melikian, text-based video pieces whic... more This essay discusses the works of Canadian artist Nathalie Melikian, text-based video pieces which explore the interrelationship of genre and intertextuality. Composed of a sequence of pointed text fragments, each work explores the thematic and formal conventions of a familiar filmic genre, for example horror, drawing attention to the question of originality by seemingly uncovering their formulaic construction. While ironically commenting on such procedures, her work simultaneously illustrates the difficulty in avoiding standardised production techniques; her own series adopts the same approach to each genre.
The focus of the paper is on the narrative tensions developed by these pieces. The recognition of familiar elements encourages narrative formation. The alphabetised presentation, and continuous soundtrack, suggest that the accelerated appearance of these framed texts would surely result in a narrative. Yet these discontinuous fragments link not one story but many. These segments, particular instances or general indications, are not text but intertext, a mapping of what Genette might call the architext, a cross-section of a textual matrix. These pieces illustrate the links that dissect every story, the non-linear relations to other, external, stories. Revealing the well-trod paths of generic narrative, they show us also the alternatives, the untold of every narrative.

Silesian Studies in English 2018: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of English and American Studies, 2019

This chapter explores John Banville’s Kepler (1981) as a spatial form. First considering the book... more This chapter explores John Banville’s Kepler (1981) as a spatial form. First considering the book as a physical volume of significant shapes and areas, the chapter then analyses how the text further structures its space by disrupting its linear order. Finally, it discusses how the space is perceived, asking how the reader can ever achieve a complete vision of the space of this or any text. It also wonders about the reason for this structure and concludes that the text, by creating form from the chaos of Kepler’s life through repetition and coincidence, succeeds in producing a truer representation of the space through which Kepler believed he moved.

Twentieth-Century American Fiction, Dec 17, 2010

The Literary Encyclopedia, 2005

Modern Language Review, Jan 1, 2006

University of London, Jan 1, 2002

"This thesis is concerned with the space of text, with the composition of that space, its form an... more "This thesis is concerned with the space of text, with the composition of that space, its form and substance, and also with the perception and experience of that space. The argument takes in existing theoretical attempts to explain the spatiality of texts, particularly Joseph Frank's 1945 essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," and tests their ideas against literary texts which, it will be argued, make a vital contribution to our comprehension of textual space. The keys texts studied are John Banville's Kepler, Paul Auster's City of Glass, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and the works of Thomas Pynchon.

As an understanding of the space of text develops, the work of Henri Lefebvre, and especially his 1974 text The Production of Space, comes increasingly to the fore. Criticising traditional philosophical concepts of space, which tend to view space in either purely physical or mental terms, Lefebvre's work enables us to place the discussion on textual space within a wider context. Textual space is seen to emerge as a social space, and thus a social product, capable of being employed in different ways within society, as a representation of space, aligned with mental space, or as a representational space, allied to lived spaces. The final sections of the thesis explore the reader's experience of this lived textual space, and question the role and place of textual space in the social realm."

University College Cork, Jan 1, 1997

Joint book launch by UL English researchers, 7 April 2017 University of Limerick, Ireland Jane A... more Joint book launch by UL English researchers, 7 April 2017
University of Limerick, Ireland

Jane Austen and Performance by Marina Cano
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Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction by David Coughlan