Some thoughts on the seminar by Danny Denton 01/02/2023

“Being Present: how ideas of physical space, place & non-place were used to build the worlds of The Earlie King… and All Along The Echo” seminar by Danny Denton was a very good source for a variety of ideas. First of all, the seminar introduced to me the idea of Hauntology, a term coined by Jacques Derrida in his book Specters of Marx (1993) in which he refers to his notion that the ghost of Marxism – and therefore the ghost of the past in general – keeps haunting society. Examples of hauntology in literature such as Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as well as authors such as John Dos Passos and John Moriarty (whom I found extremely interesting!) made me curious about the subject. Furthermore, this discussion urged me to find and read Mark Fisher’s article “What is Hauntology?” in which he explores, among other things, the concept of hauntology in movies.

The discussion about the concept of place and non-place which followed was similarly very interesting and it had been a topic which I had explored in my undergraduate thesis concerning madness in literature, focusing on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, in which I tried to explore how time and space were being structured by the authors and manipulated by the characters in order to reach their goals. I was not familiar with Mark Augé’s “Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity” which I will definitely study in order to better understand the concepts of place and non-place.

Finally, Danny Denton mentioned that it is important for his writing to have layer upon layer of history within his narrative. This reminded me of the concept of psychogeography which I first encountered in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell in which he unearths London’s past(s) through his narrative. This prompted me to read more about psychogeography. I have found a very insightful page about it and read four articles by Aled Singleton, two of them being “How British Literary Psychogeography Offers Possibilities for Researchers”(https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2022/12/how-british-literary-psychogeography-offers-possibilities-for-researchers/) and “Mapping the Ebb and Flow of Psychogeography” (https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2022/12/mapping-the-ebb-and-flow-of-psychogeography/). The next step will be for me to read a couple of novels by Iain Sinclair whose many works deal with the concept of psychogeography and moreover to find out which novels by Michael Moorcock (one of my favourite authors) deals with psychogeography as well, because I have seen his name mentioned a couple of times in articles associated with it. Maybe I will try my hand at writing a psychogeographical text about Cork myself (or maybe I shouldn’t?). Overall, Danny Denton’s seminar was one of the most interesting ones so far and prompted me to discover a lot of theories, concepts and narrative structures I was not familiar with, unearth long forgotten ones, and explore new ones which led me to others.