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영어

This essay investigates how Nathaniel Hawthorne theorizes and thematizes the oxymoronic—negatively substantial—existence of ghost as an epistemological and ontological question of modern reality and subject. At the heart of modernity, Hawthorne suggests in The Scarlet Letter, is the essential spectrality characteristic of the way both subjectivity and sociality are constituted and perceived. In the romance’s introductory chapter, “The Custom-House,” he not only portrays how his political, socioeconomic, and cultural condition is defined as a ghost-like mode of life, but indicates that the reality itself is built on its spectral ambivalence of the (un)real. The tale’s three main characters also show the collective way in which their respective modern selfhood reveals their negated subjectivity, only to prove its existential substance. Drawing upon the Kantian formulation of negative substance, I propose that Hawthorne revises the philosophical account of the spectral as a constitutive condition of modern thought and being in his romance theory and fiction so as to open the way for a new understanding of hauntology or a study of the spectral and its profound political significance.