ABSTRACT

What follows is a “recit[ation] of the Past” and more specifically a case study of me and of an archive about two centuries of dead fathers that has sat in boxes in my garage until the occasion of this literary talking cure. It is an exercise in what we might think of as “auto-haunting” – calling up ghosts rather than waiting for them to appear – and at the same time in putting the dead to rest so as to be able to “approach the Future as a friend.”