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

Critics have long reached for pseudo-spiritual terms to describe Shirley Jackson’s work–haunted, gothic, mythological–but they do so to cut off the possibility that she could have been “really” religious. Professor Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., of the Department of Theology at Fordham University argues that Jackson may instead help us understand the very act of “feeling haunted” in reading as a form of religion in literature that resists the secular/religious binary.

This event is organized by the Forum on the Imagination with support from the Sanzone Center and the Forum on Religion and Literature