‘Something that wants me to find it’: Hauntology, race, and curricular disturbances in Updike’s “rabbit” tetralogy

Abstract

This paper interrogates the epistemic and pedagogical significance of literature and philosophy within the field of curriculum theory through a reading of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy. Following the reconceptualist turn, which foregrounds subjective and aesthetic experience over technocratic outcomes, I position the novel as a site for moral imagination and curricular disruption. Engaging Derrida’s (1993/2011) notion of hauntology, I examine the novel’s protagonist, Harry Angstrom, as haunted by crises of faith over temporal existence as well as racialized violence. Literature, I argue, is a site of study for curriculum theorists to begin reimagining teacher and student subjectivity and alterity as a spectral shaping of educational experience.

Keywords

References

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