"Swear it": examining the secret pact of the scholar through the ghosts of Hamlet's father in the works of Borges and Joyce's "Scylla and Charybdis"
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Date
2011-09-14
Authors
Ostapyk, Tyler
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Abstract
Following contemporary readings/writings of the ghosts of Hamlet’s father, in particular those of Derrida, Borges, and Joyce, this study intends to further elucidate the affiliation between scholar, spectre, and archive. This work demonstrates how Hamlet both conforms to a scholarly process of archivization and a silencing of the ghost, and simultaneously renders a slipping away of the spectre at its precise point of capture, engendering the infinite archive that is “irreducible by explanation” (Derrida, 1998, p. 87) and never closed. It is this opening and pulling apart, this expansion at the point of its closure, that allows the ghosts of Shakespeare and his Hamlet to enter into the texts of Borges, Joyce, and Derrida.
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Keywords
Archive, Derrida, Spectre, Hamlet, Borges, Joyce, Shakespeare, Ghost