Marie Darrieussecq's Ghost

While it has been argued by proponents of surface reading that ghosts should be "just read," a closer analysis of contemporary French writer Marie Darrieussecq's oeuvre reveals that ghosts cannot be read only in terms of what they may represent; one must rather take into account what they do and how they are produced. Through Darrieussecq's spectral engagement with her own work, and following Jacques Derrida's invitation to consider ghosts as possibility, this article reads ghosts as metafictional figures appearing within the text's own fabric and not external to it; it also questions the reader's involvement in the conjuration of ghosts.