Ghosts of Literature: Tracing the Spectral in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley

Abstract

This thesis investigates the ways in which literature can access the spectral as an alternative to dualist discourse within the selected works of Samuel T. Coleridge and Mary Shelley. Western dualistic philosophy promotes a sharp distinction between the ontological categories of mind and matter, life and death, being and non-being. Within such a system of binaries, hierarchies arise, in which mind is favoured over matter. Derrida's concept of hauntology manifests as a response to dualistic discourse by inhabiting an in-between space. In this work, I investigate five of Coleridges’s poems and Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein as a challenge to binaric thinking. I take as a point of departure the Coleridge Spinozan/Christian debate, in which scholars have mostly attempted to identify Coleridge as Spinozist (monist) or Christian (dualist), leaving little space for both philosophies to co-occur within his work. However, I maintain that it is the very tension between the respective views that has inspired Coleridge throughout his life, providing his poetry with creativity and innovation. Derrida’s notion of hauntology is a flexible concept leaving space for ambiguity and contradiction. With this method, I approach Coleridge’s poetry, revealing its hauntological nature by expressing that which cannot be grasped by dualistic thinking. In turn, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is investigated revealing the novel’s spectrality as a challenge to dualistic discourse.