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Gail Crowther
Gail Crowther
Thesis Working Title
The Haunted Reader & Sylvia Plath
Research Interests
Abstract The Haunted Reader & Sylvia Plath
'This is a case without a body'
Sylvia Plath 'The Detective'
This piece of research aims to explore the notion of haunting. If, as Jacqueline Rose (1991) claims, Sylvia Plath is a ghost that haunts our culture, a ghost created from myths and stories and fantasies, then what happens to these myths and fantasies when they seep into the world at large? How does Plath return and in what way does she inform the lives of her readers?
Drawing on work carried out by feminist scholars such as Annette Kuhn (1995), Caroline Steedman (1986) and Valerie Walkerdine (1990) and by collecting, combining and critiquing the 'creative' autobiographies of Plath readers, I shall explore how they respond to Plath via time, place, space, images and objects. How do readers use their use 'creative autobiography' as a way of engaging in self narration and identity formation via the use of a cultural object or figure? Exactly what is it that occurs at the meeting point between reader and writer that creates such a powerful attraction? I aim to explore the current debates around the role of the author, the position of the reader within the text and psychoanalytic theories of identification and loss. As such, this research is not about Sylvia Plath, but is what is left of her and how these remains are used.
'This is a case without a body' claimed the speaker of Plath's poem.
So, too, is this piece of research.
Publications
The Richard Wilbur Forum (2007)
'The Playfulness of Time' (2008) in Plath Profiles Interdisciplinary Journal Vol 1, Indiana University.
'An Evening with Frieda Hughes' on www.sylviaplath.info
'Staring at the Sea: Fantasy & the Disturbance of Place' in The Sociologist Vol 3 March 2009
These Ghostly Archives (2009)with Peter K. Steinberg in Plath Profiles Interdisciplinary Journal Vol2, Indiana University
Conferences
Sociology Summer Conference 2007, Lancaster University. Paper given 'The Use of Icons in the Construction of Personal Identity.'
The 75th Sylvia Plath Symposium 2007, Oxford University. Paper given 'The Playfulness of Time'.
Melancholic States 2007, Lancaster University (helper & chair).
Sociology Summer Conference 2008, Lancaster University. Paper given 'The Ghostly Archives and the Reanimation of the Dead'.
Words by the Water March 2009, Keswick, Cumbria.
Sociology Summer Conference 2009, Lancaster University. Paper given 'The Haunting Double& Sylvia Plath: A Re-visioning of Otto Rank.'
Research Funding
Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University 2006-2009
Current Teaching
SOC101: Part I
What is Sociology Now?
Modern Lives
City Lives
Techno Lives
Media Lives
Mobile Lives
Part II
Advanced Seminars
309 Television, Society and Morality
Lectures: Women's Studies 101
Women in Art
Keywords: Feminist theory, Foucault, Freud, Identity, Memorialisation, Memory, Narratives, Place-writing, Poetry, Psychoanalytic thought
Publications
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