The Haunted Imagination: Shirley Jackson and the Allure of Non-Ontological Spirit

Famous for her generation-defining short story “The Lottery” and “the definitive haunted house story” The Haunting of Hill House, critics in her own day and beyond have reached for pseudo-spiritual terms to describe Shirley Jackson’s work – haunted, gothic, mythological, primitive, and mysterious – but they do so to cut off the possibility that she could have been “really” religious. This talk will explore the affects her work generates as themselves spiritually meaningful – for Jackson and for her readers – by probing the forms of haunted imagination that emerge from spiritual power that is neither transcendent nor ontologically sticky. Jackson may help us understand the very act of feeling haunted in reading as a form of religion in literature that resists the secular/religious binary. The talk will conclude by exploring what happens to these haunted feelings when Jackson’s work migrates from the literary to the visual, in film and television specifically.