Nuclear Piece: Memoires of Hamlet and the Time to Come@@@Memoires: For Paul de Man@@@Hamlet@@@"Nuclear Criticism."

“Impossible Mourning” in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Michèle Roberts's Daughters of the House

From its opening on starlit battlements, “Who's there?”, Hamlet announces itself as an Advent play for a New Year. So it is no surprise that Hamlet studies took a messianic turn at the millennium, when the text's unhinged gates welcomed Derrida to futurity, while apocalyptic critics like Girard read it as a vigil for the end of the world. As Europe's ghost story, however, Hamlet looks back to what belief in “the end of history” would repress: the religious violence encoded in its terrorist call to revenge. Francis Barker's insight that “the only thing Hamlet doesn't escape is its historicity”, is thus enhanced by the shifting outlook as Quartos and Folio adapt to prospects for a religion to come. Shakespeare may have hoped that if “the world's grown honest” then “is Doomsday near”, but in Hamlet was terrified of waking too soon—like the girl from New Place buried alive in Stratford church. So the cock crows three times in this tragedy to warn against betraying the future with false starts. Though “Present...

When the Cock Crew: The Imminence of Hamlet

Nuclear Criticism. By KEN RUTHVEN. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press and London: University College, London Press. 1993. vii+120 pp.

“Nuclear criticism” ten years on

Atomic Apocalypse---'Nuclear Fiction' in German Literature and Culture

The chapter discusses the varied roles that spectrality and the haunted house play in contemporary queer Gothic fiction, especially texts with a historical component. Whereas Berman in Vintage: A Ghost Story portrays his contemporary gay teenage protagonist encountering a ghost from the 1950s, Sarah Waters’ Affinity, in contrast, focuses on the spiritualist movement that flourished in the 1870s, exploring its lesbian associations. Louise Tondeur’s The Water’s Edge describes the haunting of a hotel on the British South by the lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual relationships in the history of the family who own it. Jim Grimsley in the Winter Birds, in contrast, examines, from viewpoint of the eight-year-old Danny, the metaphorical haunting of the family by his father’s rages.

Nuclear Piece: Memoires of Hamlet and the Time to Come@@@Memoires: For Paul de Man@@@Hamlet@@@"Nuclear Criticism."

Citations

“Impossible Mourning” in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Michèle Roberts's Daughters of the House

When the Cock Crew: The Imminence of Hamlet

“Nuclear criticism” ten years on

Atomic Apocalypse---'Nuclear Fiction' in German Literature and Culture

Ghosts and Haunted Houses