Ghost World Research Articles

从《阅微草堂笔记》看中国古代道德难题

鬼神世界是人类社会的投影，中国传统民间信仰中冥司对人进行的善恶评判和报应，是人间道德评价的折射。但在清朝纪昀《阅微草堂笔记》的故事中，冥司的冥王、官吏有时在对人行为的对错、人品的善恶的裁定，及在此基础上进行奖惩时发生意见分歧，甚至冲突，他们也有无奈不能决的时候。这折射出在某些情境下，人间在道德选择上的困境和道德评价上的困难，从中，我们可以看到中国古代的道德难题。道德难题产生的原因是不同道德体系或同一道德体系下不同道德要求上的分歧和冲突，以及在某种情境下或在某些领域，社会在道德和道德理论方面缺乏共识。 Ghost world is a projection of human society, the evaluation and retribution for good and evil made by the Hades officials in Chinese traditional folk belief, is the refraction of human moral evaluation. But in the story of the Qing dynasty’s Notes from the Yuewei Hut written by Ji Yun, the judgment about people’s behavior and character made by the Hades officials, and therefore, the rewards and punishment on the basis of this is different, even conflict, they were there but that can’t be solved sometimes. This reflects the difficulties in moral choice and moral evaluation in some situations, from which we can see the ethical dilemmas in ancient China. Ethical dilemmas arising reasons is the difference and conflict on moral requirements which from different moral systems or the same moral system, and in some situations or in some areas, people’s in lack of consensus on moral idea and ethical theory.

Sarah Beckwith Shakespeare and the Grammar of ForgivenessShakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+228.

<i>Sarah Beckwith</i> Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness<i>Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness</i>. Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+228.

From Ghost World to Your World

Spring Warren interviews Daniel Clowes, Oakland-based Graphic Novelist whose works include Ghost World, Wilson, and others.

What Not to Wear: Exposing the G(host) in Art Education

Two films, Ghost World and Art School Confidential, serve as backdrops for an examination of art education, revealing identity conflicts among artist, student, and teacher. This article addresses ideas of uniqueness, uniformity, professionalism, and nakedness through the concept of personal dress. This critical discussion explores the influence of society on the Lacanian identity in terms of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real registers. Clothing expresses personal identity while providing a mask for the lack of a unified self. In exposing dynamics between conflicting identities, the phantom reality of self and the possibility of self-questioning to artists/educators, this article suggests a repressive ghost in the academic host and a suppressive ghost in the host-self.

Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity by David Simpson

David Simpson. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 292. $99. David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones (3). By characterizing him these terms, Simpson is part calling attention how obsessively William Wordsworth's verse treats figures--like the discharged soldier of Prelude, Book 4, the old Cumberland beggar, or Margaret The Ruined Cottage--who are spooky their de-animated, death-in-life demeanor and their tragic disconnection from human sociality. He is also underlining how Wordsworth's self-representations partake of the same spectrality, so that the poet somehow wanders lonely even when, as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals indicate, he ought by rights describe himself as enjoying company. To approach this Romantic ghost world Simpson takes a path distinct from that followed by the many Romanticists who, while aligning Wordsworth and Freud, have foregrounded the elegiac strain verse that seems forever be rehearsing loss (of Lucy, of a younger self, of his brother John) and that brings the dead back only lose them once more. spectrality this book treats is likewise misapprehended if construed as a link connecting Wordsworth the Romantic period's Gothic tales and ballads and so as yet another indication that a poet his day perforce lived (as Thomas Love Peacock complained) in the days that are and was obliged make exploded superstition and premodern custom his stock-in-trade. On the contrary, the ghost-seeing recorded by Wordsworth's verse and demanded of his readers is not the product of a backward look, but rather, Simpson insists, a marker of this poet's ongoing relevance. Wordsworth's specters express the conditions of their time, which is ... still our time and as far as we can see the time still come (11). poetry which they feature is the vehicle of an unresolved history we still inhabit (13), one reason Simpson has found himself returning it, making this his third book on Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real appeared 1982, and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination 1987). In its dramatization of indigence, dislocation, and disconnection, guilt and sorrow, Wordsworth's poetics of modernity represents, Simpson avers, a signal resource with which theorize the conditions of human existence a modern lifeworld shaped by the achieved dominance of the commodity form. In Specters of Marx--a key resource for this argument--Derrida pondered the claim about the specter haunting Europe that had opened Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto and noted that there are several times of the specter. By returning, the revenant might testify either to a living past or a living future. capitalist societies who post-1989 triumphally declared communism history--obsolescent, a dead end--should have remembered, Derrida suggests, that precisely never dying the ghost remains both to come-back and to come (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge, 1994], 99). Through brilliant readings of an immense range of Wordsworth's poems, Simpson seeks a similar fashion rebuke accounts of Wordsworth as history, a figure so distant time from us as be over and done with. (Generally this is his students' response, he notes an Introduction whose attention the travails of pedagogy will, for many academic readers, occasion gleams of recognition and remembered sensations of sad perplexity.) For Simpson, the ghostly figures Wordsworth's works, rather than blasts from the past, haunt the present from the present itself (145). Thus Simpson's Wordsworth finally places little credit the Burkean traditionalism and attendant notions of an organic social solidarity that he sometimes espoused. He is notable, rather, for his insight into the abstraction, hollowness, and deadness that commodification introduces into human relations. …

Ovid, Metamorphoses 15. 418–452: Pythagoras’ Helenus on epic grandeur and epic succession

The placement of Helenus, the Trojan seer, near the end of Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15, humorously comments on the Augustan projection of Rome’s predestined world conquest. In Metamorphoses 15, the philosopher Pythagoras casts himself in the light of the Vergilian Helenus. Among the various common characteristics Helenus and Pythagoras share outstanding is their metaliterary identity as conveyed in an interfusion of comprehensive knowledge, communication of uncontested truth but also adherence to deception: the Ovidian Pythagoras’ speech is ridden with inaccurate information and chronological fallacies, while Ovid’s Helenus is in fact the Vergilian Helenus, a confused individual who lives in the deceptive contentment of an a-chronic world of ghosts. By means of undermining the infallibility of prophesying through the lack of credibility of the prophet, Ovid undermines the standardization of the literary motif of epic prophecies about Rome’s world conquest, a much advertized theme in the various expressions of Augustan ideology of global conquest.

13 Treasures (review)

Reviewed by: 13 Treasures April Spisak Harrison, Michelle. 13 Treasures. Little, 2010. 355p. ISBN 978-0-316-04148-5 $15.99 R Gr. 5-7. Tanya doesn't mean to drive her mother crazy, but when you are the only one who sees taunting fairies, it's hard on those around you. The British thirteen-year-old is shipped off to live on her grandmother's secluded estate, and there she discovers that the parallel world of fairies, magical creatures, and ghosts is much larger, and even more ominous, than she suspected. Fortunately, Tanya has a dog, a friend (the son of an employee at the house), and a couple of magical tools that may get her out of trouble. Which is good, as she finds plenty of trouble whe a decades-old scandal involving her family and a new horror involving changeling babies demand her attention and her ability to see and interact with both worlds. Fantasy fans will find the dizzying array of otherworldly creatures, each kind equipped with its own social hierarchies and mores, quite intriguing. Tanya, defiant and wise enough to spot when blustering deserves compassion instead of defensiveness, is an amiable guide through it all, and the rambling estate, cloaked in years of pain and secrets, is so intricately described that it almost becomes a protagonist in itself. Younger readers initially daunted by the page count will be easily reassured by the swift pace, compelling characters (both human and otherwise), and web of carefully developed and cleanly resolved plots. [End Page 22] Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

COSMOPOLITANISM, REMEDIATION, AND THE GHOST WORLD OF BOLLYWOOD

This essay considers the process of remediation in two North American reproductions of the song-and-dance sequence Jaan Pehechaan Ho from the 1965 “Bollywood” film Gumnaam. The song was used in the opening sequence of the 2001 U.S. independent film Ghost World as a familiar-but-strange object of ironic bewilderment and fantasy for its alienated teenage protagonist Enid. But a decade before Ghost World's release, Jaan Pehechaan Ho had already become the lynchpin of a complex debate about cultural appropriation and multicultural identity for an “alternative” audience in the United States. I illustrate this through an ethnographic analysis of a 1994 videotape of the Heavenly Ten Stems, an experimental rock band in San Francisco, whose performance of the song was disrupted by a group of activists who perceived their reproduction as a mockery. How is Bollywood film song, often itself a kitschy send-up of American popular culture, remediated differently for different projects of reception? How do these cycles of appropriation create overlapping conditions for new identities—whether national, diasporic, or “alternative”—within the context of transcultural media consumption? In drawing out the “ghost world” of Bollywood's juxtapositions, I argue that the process of remediation produces more than just new forms and meanings of media, but is constitutive of the cosmopolitan subjects formed in its global circulations.

The Ghost World of Alienated Desire

The Ghost World of Alienated Desire

"May contain graphic material": comic books, graphic novels, and film

Since the first Superman film came to the screen in 1978, films adapted from comics have become increasingly important as a film form. But 1978 was also important because it was the year of release for Will Eisner's A Contract with God, and Other Stories, generally credited as the first long-form comic book to label itself a graphic novel. Since that time, advances in computer-generated special effects have significantly improved the ability of film to capture the style and action of comics, producing such hugely successful films as X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002). Meanwhile, the genre of the graphic novel has greatly evolved as a form-especially through the works of people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore-taking comics in dramatically new and different directions, generally darker and more serious than conventional comics. Graphic novels have also formed the basis for less visually spectacular, but intelligent and thoughtful films such as Ghost World (2001) and American Splendor (2002). Booker surveys this important development in film history, tracking the movement to a more mature style in comics, and then a more mature style in films about comics. He focuses on detailed discussions of 15 major films or franchises, but also considers the general impact of graphic novels on the style and content of American film in general. The Batman franchise, especially in the 1989 film and in 2005's Batman Begins, has provided adaptations of a classic comic-book motif inflected through the Dark Knight graphic novels of Frank Miller. The marriage of new film technology and the development of the genre of the graphic novel has produced a number of important innovations in film, including such breakthrough efforts in visual art as The Crow (1994), and Sin City (2005). Films such as Road to Perdition (2002) and A History of Violence (2005) have provided interesting adaptations of noirish graphic novels that rely somewhat less on visual style to achieve their effects.

Musicology after Identity—: Four Fragments

Musicology after Identity—Four Fragments James Robert Currie (bio) And so, one must accept that the hyperbolic could well end up as a grain of sand. This is, of course, the fate of all actions. Since thought is also an action, since it is not in opposition to action, it must undergo the same fate. Jacques Derrida, "Politics and Friendship" Redeem After the torchlight red on sweaty facesAfter the frosty silence in the gardensAfter the agony in stony placesThe shouting and the cryingPrison and palace and reverberationOf thunder of spring over distant mountainsHe who was living is now deadWe who were living are now dyingWith a little patience. T. S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said," The Waste Land Eventually, Cindy Sheehan left the highly visible ongoing protest she had established outside of President Bush's Crawford holiday estate in Texas. She had received death threats, been systematically ignored by both the Republicans and the Democrats, and been lampooned by the media, so finally she concluded that the toll on her health, resources, and family had become too much—business as usual for a political activist. What, however, was shocking was the admittance of despair in her resignation. Her son Casey's death, she concluded, had indeed been for nothing and not simply because the reason he had found himself in the place where he would die was founded on lies regarding the Iraq war's justification. Rather, there could be no redemption because no force other than the almost completely corporatized American government could be invoked to revenge her son's ghost. In effect, she proclaimed [End Page 87] that there is no America through alignment to which his death could be dignified, nothing that could be distinguished from the very America that condemned him in the first place, no outside to those forces that are turning the United States, in her words, into a "fascist corporate wasteland." (One wonders, awfully, if she may in fact see Casey as part of her very object of criticism, i.e., as someone complicit with the very thing that killed him.) "Casey died," she states, "for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."1 Hypnotized by the ghosts on TV that we will never be, we ourselves have become ghosts, and the tangibility of those who die because of our intangibility is barely opaque enough to even register in the space covered by our gaze as it haunts its way from us to the media, where it dreams us into the only solid thing we know: a fetish (an American Idol). We should remind ourselves, a fetish in psychoanalysis is that which stands in place so as to disavow an absence someplace else; it is the worst form of a ghost, a solid one, and so incapable of even spooking us into acknowledgment of what we have lost and of the revenge that we must enact for others as much as ourselves. This is what is terrifying about Sheehan's proclamation: in a world of ghosts there can be no retribution, for that can only be done by the living. And so the political question that our present catastrophic context raises is once more the oldest one of philosophy: How, therefore, must we live? Live Unreal City,Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. T. S. Eliot, "The Burial of the Dead," The Waste Land Concerns that we might not be alive and of the impotency inherent in becoming ghost have haunted modernity at least since Herder and the counter-Enlightenment debates of the eighteenth century. Today we are made ghost by our immersion within, in Guy Debord's famous phrase, a society of the spectacle.2 For Herder, the cause was Enlightenment reason, since reason is itself ghostly. Since, hypothetically, we are all in possession of it, reason is both always within us, here and now as part of...

Film and comic books

In Film and Comic Books contributors analyze the problems of adapting one medium to another; the translation of comics aesthetics into film; audience expectations, reception, and reaction to comic book-based films; and the adaptation of films into comics. A wide range of comic/film adaptations are explored, including superheroes (Spider-Man), comic strips (Dick Tracy), realist and autobiographical comics (American Splendor, Ghost World), and photo-montage comics (Mexico's El Santo). Essayists discuss films beginning with the 1978 Superman. That success led filmmakers to adapt a multitude of comic books for the screen including Marvel's Uncanny X-Men, the Amazing Spider-Man, Blade, and the Incredible Hulk as well as alternative graphic novels such as From Hell, V for Vendetta, and Road to Perdition. Essayists also discuss recent works from Mexico, France, Germany, and Malaysia. Essays from Timothy P. Barnard, Michael Cohen, Rayna Denison, Martin Flanagan, Sophie Geoffroy-Menoux, Mel Gibson, Kerry Gough, Jonathan Gray, Craig Hight, Derek Johnson, Pascal Lef?vre, Paul M. Malone, Neil Rae, Aldo J. Regalado, Jan van der Putten, and David Wilt Ian Gordon is associate professor of history and convenor of American studies at the National University of Singapore. Mark Jancovich is professor of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia. Matthew P. McAllister is associate professor of film, video, and media studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Commentary on Paper by Françoise Davoine

Françoise Davoine sees madness as a research project involving the uncanny presence of ghosts arising from the realm of the transference as well as the “big” history of wider social catastrophes across the generations, in effect “cut-out” pieces of the unconscious. Madness is a rupture in the social link that needs repairing. The therapist is a coresearcher with the individual whose madness tells a story embedded in the heart of madness itself. Davoine presents her work with a woman who has a history of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. She invites her patient to link up with and speak of that which formerly resided in the Lacanian Real, that is, the unsymbolized haunting absence of her mother who was tragically murdered by the Nazis. The therapist's dream becomes a bridge to this world of ghosts for both patient and therapist. The dream ushers in an enactment and a transference interpretation by the therapist, which leads to a disappearance of madness from the analytic stage. I attempt to apply the theories of Post Kleinians, as well as Harold Searles and Gaetano Benedetti, to help illuminate the processes of therapeutic action. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to dreams and a relational view of madness are also addressed.

Getting Started with Graphic Novels

Graphic novels are an incredibly popular format in all types of libraries. Popular movies such as Batman, Spider-Man, V for Vendetta, and Sin City are all based on graphic novels or comics and underscore the growing appreciation for the medium. Readers are leading the way, demanding these titles and teaching us the joys of the graphic form. Yet despite our patrons' call for these items in our collections, it is often hard to know what to buy, what is useful and popular in a sea of seemingly odd titles and collections, and how to approach the question of suitability and classification. An academic librarian undertaking a collection-building effort at her university wrote this Alert Collector column. fact that academic librarians are paying attention to the form simply strengthens the argument that this particular type of reading experience has far exceeded its day as a boyhood pastime (if indeed that perception was ever true). Anne Behler is a reference librarian at Pennsylvania State University who works in the Maps and Gateway Libraries specifically, and in the instructional programs department (which runs the services of the library that are geared primarily toward meeting undergraduate and first-time user needs). She is the selector in charge of contemporary topics, which led her to developing Penn State's graphic novel collection. Demonstrating her commitment to student outreach, she is the co-chair of the libraries' annual open house, an event that welcomes more than four thousand students to the libraries each year, and is involved in the library's pilot effort at providing remote reference services in the university's student union building (the HUB). She is an active member of the ALA and the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), serving on the Reference Services Section's Education and Professional Development for Reference Committee, as well as serving as intern for the RUSA Thomson Gale Award for Excellence in Reference and Adult Services Committee.--Editor. graphic novel format, like all forms of narrative, includes many different types of stories. For example, the superhero story is intriguingly told in Mark Waid's Kingdom Come. In this graphic novel, a slew of well-known DC Comic superheroes, such as Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, confront the challenges of their new generation, and not so moral, successors. teen-interest novel, those sly and moody books that explore the angst of approaching adulthood, finds particularly rich expression in the graphic format, as exemplified by Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. Satire is also a common form, best represented by Robert Crumb's work. Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond is an excellent introduction to manga, which is an extension of Japanese anime and an art form in and of itself. These works often have strong appeal with teenage girls, proving yet again that stereotypes of the format are pointless. Graphic works include nonfiction as well and cover such topics as true crime, history, science, biography, and memoir. A good example of this is the stellar work Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies, which poignantly captures the story of his mother's battle with lung cancer. Finally, adaptations such as Jerry Bingham's Beowulf take well-known stories and recreate them in a graphic format, making accessible to some readers works that would otherwise be off-putting. This rich range of reading choices not only answers our patrons' calls for titles, it adds a richness and depth to our collections and helps encourage a love of reading. graphic novel represents a format that has come into its own in the last three decades. In the words of Will Eisner, the man credited with writing the first graphic novel and coining the term for the format, The manner of [comics] creation has evolved from a work written and drawn by a single individual to a wedding between writer and artist. This has established a creative process that employs the skills of an accomplished writer and an artist of great sophistication. …

“Too Much Knowledge of the Other World”: Women and Nineteenth-Century Irish Folktales

The IRISH literary revival of the 1880s and 90s, also known as the Irish Renaissance or Celtic Twilight, was largely inspired by an interest in folklore. While the best known Irish folklore collections remain those by key figures in this movement such as Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory, the popular appetite for Irish folklore had in fact been strong throughout the nineteenth century. This essay examines Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland ( 1825), the first collection of Irish folktales, and Jeremiah Curtin's Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World: Collected from Oral Tradition in Southwest Munster (1895). Both collections draw their material from the same region and focus on tales of personal experience with the supernatural, rather than on heroic legends or wonder tales. Yet their representations of women, and particularly of female storytellers, contrast sharply. The differences in their methodology and style, as well as in the content of the tales, reflect not only the quirks of the individual collectors but also the dramatic social changes in rural Irish life after the Great Famine of 1845 to 49. Curtin 's tales illustrate a marked increase in conflict between the sexes, a phenomenon that historians such as Hasia Diner have attributed to the decline of marriage, the greater economic independence of women, and their tendency to emigrate alone or in all-female groups in the late nineteenth century. Whereas Croker treats female storytellers with an easygoing acceptance and respect, Curtin explicitly declares his bias against them; indeed, his dismissal of women's storytelling skills reinforces a prevailing motif in the tales he selects : that of women who are f orceably silenced. Moreover, the supernatural women in Curtin's collection fairy abductees or ghosts are remarkably vengeful and violent. Tracing the representation of female storytellers and of women's supernatural experiences in specific tales from each collection, I argue that Curtin's tales encode intense social anxieties about marriage and the radical shift in women's roles in nineteenth-century rural Ireland. Before examining each collection, however, I will briefly consider the role of women in Irish oral tradition, an issue Clodagh Brennan Harvey has described as anything but clear {Contemporary Irish 12). Harvey concedes that women most likely participated less in the storytelling than men, citing their preoccupation ... with their domestic responsibilities, which limitfed] their opportunities to hear and to learn new tales, and thus to participate more actively in the tradition (12). At the same time, she suggests that women's storytelling is simply less well documented. Because men and women usually went visiting

Ghost without a Machine: Enid's Anxiety of Depth(lessness) in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World

Ghost without a Machine: Enid's Anxiety of Depth(lessness) in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World

Neoliberalism and the Disappearance of the Social in Ghost World

Neoliberalism and the Disappearance of the Social in Ghost World

The World Made by Human Studies

In 19791 spent the summer at a National Endowment for the Humanities sum? mer seminar at Princeton with Richard Rorty, an experience which had nu? merous consequences, including a very Rortyan paper subsequently published in Human Studies called "Social theory without wholes" (1984). Over this summer I also worked on a manuscript that grew out a long article published in Human Studies on Weber and the fact-value distinction entitled "The lim? its of reason and some limitations of Weber's morality" (Turner and Factor, 1979). The research I was doing in the Princeton library was primarily con? cerned with filling in the context in which Weber had made his famous state? ments about fact and value, and also with examining the sequelae of those writings in subsequent philosophy. This topic represents an important and dis? tinctive strand in the tradition of continental philosophy, something that has now increasingly come to be recognized (for example in Safranski's recent book on Heidegger, 1998). During that summer I came to recognize, although in a very dim way, the significance of journals as communities, and what I recognized has a great deal of bearing on my own appreciation for Human Studies. In tracking down and copying journal versions of articles in such journals as Logos, the journal of the philosophy of culture in which Rickert, Weber, and Simmel played the defining role, I entered a world of ghosts. I was well aware of the relations among these three, their relation to Jaspers, the antagonism to Scheler, and Scheler's relation to Heidegger. Something else stayed with me, however. The texts that I was looking for at Princeton not infrequently were no longer shelved in Firestone, the main library, but had been transferred across the river to a utilitarian but brightly lit storage library which one was able to browse, just as one could browse the stacks of Firestone itself. There I found, adjacent to the volumes I was looking for, a large number of exceptionally beautifully bound and produced journals, in German, on subjects that had, to use the Bismarkian expression of the German politics of the time, had their day in the sun, a day that in some cases ended abruptly in 1933. Today, only a specialist in the history of the human sciences could so much as write a long paragraph explaining what the intellectual movements that produced these impressive journals actually were about. But these shelved and

Teen Girls' Resistance and the Disappearing Social in Ghost World

Teen Girls' Resistance and the Disappearing Social in Ghost World

Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich'sTracks

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs ofTracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.