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The Uncanny Sexual Child

Steven Angelides

in The Fear of Child Sexuality: Young People, Sex, and Agency

Chapter 1 examines a sex panic surrounding the artwork of one of Australia’s internationally acclaimed artists, Bill Henson. Known for his photography on adolescents, Henson was at the center of a ... More

Chapter 1 examines a sex panic surrounding the artwork of one of Australia’s internationally acclaimed artists, Bill Henson. Known for his photography on adolescents, Henson was at the center of a scandal about images of naked teenagers exhibited in an exhibition in Sydney in 2008. The Australian nation fiercely debated whether these works, one of which depicts a 12-year-old girl with budding breasts and hairless pudenda, are art or pornography. While tracing the polarization of debate around art versus pornography, innocence versus its adulteration, the chapter is about what has been much less discussed, even obscured, in the way the scandal unfolded. Encapsulating the principle contention of this book, it argues that what has been obscured, misrecognized, and avoided is the subject of child sexuality and agency, and this is as central, if not more, to the issue's volatility as the avowed concerns about sexualization and exploitation.Less

The Enemy Within

Phillip Cole

in The Myth of Evil

This chapter explores the insights of psychoanalytic theory in understanding the idea of evil. It begins by exploring the narrative of fear within Gothic literature, where we are terrified of what we ... More

This chapter explores the insights of psychoanalytic theory in understanding the idea of evil. It begins by exploring the narrative of fear within Gothic literature, where we are terrified of what we cannot see. A reading of Freud's “The Uncanny” shows that the important boundary for our fears is not between life and death, but between the living and the dead – the ‘undead’ are a source of terror. In the end, what Freud teaches is that the evil monsters which haunt us are constructed out of familiar materials – we are the monsters, and our capacity for monstrous evil fills us with dread.Less

Uncanny Aesthetics

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

in Digital Uncanny

Uncanny aesthetics examines how the discourse of the uncanny emerged from a reading of E. T. A Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” in the works of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, and how these ... More

Uncanny aesthetics examines how the discourse of the uncanny emerged from a reading of E. T. A Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” in the works of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, and how these readings have shaped the way we think about the uncanny as both experiential and aesthetic. These interpretations demonstrate, as Samuel Weber puts it, “a certain indecidability” between what we personally experience and what is predetermined. The uncanny has, however, shifted from a fear of confronting unhuman objects to the fear of being exposed to others beyond the devices and programs with which we have intimate relations, and the existential crisis of not measuring up to the technologies that simulate us.Less

Uncanny Repetitions: Freud, Hoffmann, and the Death-Work

John Fletcher

in Freud and the Scene of Trauma

Chapter Twelve considers Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” contemporary with the incubation of the emergent concepts of the Death Instinct and the Superego. It locates these in the motifs of the ... More

Chapter Twelve considers Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” contemporary with the incubation of the emergent concepts of the Death Instinct and the Superego. It locates these in the motifs of the repetition-compulsion and the double Freud cites as sources of the uncanny. It argues that Freud’s essay with its reading of Hoffmann’s The Sandman as an instance of the uncanny is a thought experiment for his playing out in displaced form of the theoretical crisis that produced the Death Instinct, as he did with his turn to the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare in the theoretical crisis of the seduction theory of 1897. Freud again chooses a text structured around a traumatic primal scene and its repetition in the form of the supernatural figure of the Sandman who haunts and possess the protagonist, comparable to the daemon in Oedipus and the ghost in Hamlet. He again gives a normalizing ‘Ptolemaic’ oedipal reading that reduces the figure of the other who embodies the repetition-compulsion to the spontaneous impulses of the protagonist. Like Chapter Five, Chapter Nine undertakes a ‘Copernican’ traumatological reading of The Sandman and its companion tale of the death drive manifested in a repeated primal scene, Mademoiselle de Scudery.Less

The Unconscious

Patrick Hayes

in Philip Roth: Fiction and Power

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Roth has refused to disconnect his role as the politically-engaged public intellectual from the writer’s interest in exploring and exploiting the unconscious. This ... More

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Roth has refused to disconnect his role as the politically-engaged public intellectual from the writer’s interest in exploring and exploiting the unconscious. This refusal has led to some of his most seemingly dutiful work, such as The Plot Against America (2001). But it has also generated his riskiest book, Operation Shylock (1993), in which Israel of the second Intifada is explored through an uncanny literary experience that uncensors public discourse about Israelis, Palestinians, and the Holocaust alike in a way that is often bewildering and outrageous. This chapter compares Roth’s approach with that of other public intellectuals who attempt to think the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, such as Julia Kristeva and Jacqueline Rose.Less

Copying

Andrew Piper

in Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age

This chapter focuses on the imaginative possibility that something stayed the same and that this sameness was seen as juridically and aesthetically legitimate to the collected edition's rise in ... More

This chapter focuses on the imaginative possibility that something stayed the same and that this sameness was seen as juridically and aesthetically legitimate to the collected edition's rise in cultural prominence during the early nineteenth century. The legitimacy of sameness was dependent on an acceptance of the simultaneous presence and absence of a third party mediating these repetitive encounters between readers and authors. The case of Wieland's edition marked a beginning point in the emerging legitimacy of a certain kind of reprinting and textual repetition. In the early nineteenth century, following the precedent of the Göschen publishing house, publishers were increasingly occupied with collecting, packaging, and selling the collected works of their respective language's most popular authors. “The Uncanny Guest” thus enacted both the consolidation and stability that collected editions were intended to produce pieces of evidence that pointed to the necessary failure of such consolidation and control.Less

The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism, and Re-Emergence in the Rural World

Sam Wiseman

in Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

This chapter explores links, in terms of imagery, symbolism, theme, and form, that exist between a range of rural-set texts spanning the period from the fin de siècle to the First World War. It ... More

This chapter explores links, in terms of imagery, symbolism, theme, and form, that exist between a range of rural-set texts spanning the period from the fin de siècle to the First World War. It argues that the evolution of the British rural Gothic in this period reveals sympathies between canonically modernist fiction (D.H. Lawrence and May Sinclair, for example) and more formally conventional texts (such as those of M.R. James and Walter de la Mare). This suggests a broader understanding of what constitutes modernist experimentation. The chapter also traces the influence of metropolitan and industrial modernity upon the rural Gothic imaginary, and considers the dialectical relation between these two cultural and geographical spaces. It ultimately argues that in the Gothic fiction and ghost stories of the period, we see rural Britain represented as a site of uncanny returns, in which repressed traumas, anxieties and violence re-emerge.Less

“Fairy of Light”: Performative Ghosting and the Queer Uncanny

Penny Farfan

in Performing Queer Modernism

This chapter focuses on Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance to exemplify the interplay between performer and character as a central aspect of queer modernist performance that was foregrounded through the ... More

This chapter focuses on Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance to exemplify the interplay between performer and character as a central aspect of queer modernist performance that was foregrounded through the uncanny qualities of Fuller’s work. Charting Fire Dance from its origins in Fuller’s 1895 version of Salome through to its reworking as a solo and its reappearance in her autobiography, the chapter traces a queer genealogy of uncanny doubles that included Oscar Wilde, Salome, heretical witches, and new women in an incremental layering of queer and feminist resonances that flickered into view through Fuller’s experiment in illuminated dance. The uncanny in Fuller’s work thus emanated from an integral and coproductive relationship between modernist aesthetics and sexual queerness that intersected through her performing body in an intensification of the interplay between character and role, onstage and offstage, and representation and presence that was a crucial facet of queer modernist performance.Less

Tongue and Trigger: Deleuze's Erotics of the Uncanny

Cara Judea Alhadeff

in Deleuze and Sex

A set of six images along with an artist's statement.

Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic

Sam Wiseman

in Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

This introduction situates the project within existing scholarship on the Gothic, modernity, and the British landscape. It stresses that the book can be differentiated from other studies of Gothic ... More

This introduction situates the project within existing scholarship on the Gothic, modernity, and the British landscape. It stresses that the book can be differentiated from other studies of Gothic modernity both in its de-privileging of literary modernism and its specific emphasis upon place. There follows a chapter summary emphasizing thematic linkages between chapters, including the concepts of the uncanny, animism, the weird and the eerie, which are elucidated with reference to secondary texts by authors including Sigmund Freud and Mark Fisher. It also notes the dialectical character of the book’s themes and content, as it traces the evolution of relationships such as those between the Gothic and the modern, the rural and the urban, invasion and emergence, concealment and revelation.Less

Staging the Liminal

Leo Shtutin

in Spatiality and Subjecthood in Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry: Between Page and Stage

Chapter 3 implements the notion of liminality (the experience or condition of the betwixt and between) in an analysis of character and diegetic space in Jarry’s Ubu roi and Maeterlinck’s one-acts. ... More

Chapter 3 implements the notion of liminality (the experience or condition of the betwixt and between) in an analysis of character and diegetic space in Jarry’s Ubu roi and Maeterlinck’s one-acts. Both playwrights’ characters are uncanny schematizations of the human form that blur the distinctions between subject and object, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. I examine the uncanny as a category of liminality, invoking Victor Turner, Antonin Artaud, the ‘uncanny valley’ theory of Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and the fin-de-siècle cult of the marionette. Both playwrights also refuse to localize dramatic space, to transform it into a specific Somewhere by means of consistent diegetic framing. Deliberately eschewing any geographical or historical consistency in his use of proper names and toponyms, Jarry foregrounds the liminal character of his ‘Poland’ by mixing and matching names, accents, and costumes from various periods and locales. Maeterlinck, meanwhile, underscores the neither-here-nor-there-ness or indeterminacy of the dramatic situations in L’Intruse, Intérieur, and Les Aveugles.Less

Introduction: Performing the Irish-Jewish Unconscious

Stephen Watt

in "Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and The Irish-Jewish Unconscious

This chapter traces the uncanny, often emotionally intensive interactions between Irish and Jewish people from their nineteenth-century emigrations through the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the ... More

This chapter traces the uncanny, often emotionally intensive interactions between Irish and Jewish people from their nineteenth-century emigrations through the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the writing of Henry Roth, Edward Dahlberg, and James T. Farrell. It delineates this relationship in a variety of popular cultural forms—Tin Pan Alley music, for example, popular Broadway dramas like Anne Nichols’s smash hit Abie’s Irish Rose (1921), and tenement fiction by Anzia Yezierska—and outlines key theoretical concepts to be employed throughout the study. These include ideas from performance theory, psychoanalysis, affect theory, and diaspora study. This chapter also develops the idea of a “circum–North Atlantic” cultural exchange so as to explain the foregrounding of Irish, Irish-American, Jewish-American, and in some cases European writers, intellectuals, and performers in the chapters that follow.Less

The New Wandering Rocks

Stephen Watt

in "Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and The Irish-Jewish Unconscious

This chapter takes its title from an episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom visits a tawdry book stand seeking salacious titles, most of which are concealed from view. Using this ... More

This chapter takes its title from an episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom visits a tawdry book stand seeking salacious titles, most of which are concealed from view. Using this trope of the hidden, a characteristic of the Freudian uncanny, this chapter explores uncanny affinities between—and eruptions of—hidden Irishness and Jewishness in selected works of John Banville, Brendan Behan, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and Howard Jacobson. The chapter also makes the case for a “multidirectional” historical memory that juxtaposes such widespread traumas as the Great Famine and the Holocaust, in the process continuing a long tradition of paralleling Irish and Jewish diasporic experiences. One test case of multidirectional reading is provided by Bernard MacLaverty’s adducing of parallels between the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Shoah. The chapter and book conclude with a summary of more recent representations of immigrant America by Brian Friel and Gish Jen.Less

Ordinary Language and Philosophical Conversion

Andrew Norris

in Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell

This chapter evaluates Cavell’s reception of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, showing it to be more critical than it has been understood to be. For Austin, the ordinary language philosopher ... More

This chapter evaluates Cavell’s reception of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, showing it to be more critical than it has been understood to be. For Austin, the ordinary language philosopher speaks in the first-person plural to remind other philosophers of “what we say when” so as to correct the mistakes those philosophers have made in writing about ethics, epistemology, etc. But Austin cannot give a compelling explanation of why those other philosophers require such reminders: how can they have been wrong about their language and its implications, since they too are one of us who speak the language? On Cavell’s account, we forget what we say when—or, what comes to the same thing, fail to mean what we say—because we evade ourselves. Ordinary language philosophy does not correct mistakes but addresses the uncanny nature of the ordinary, that it is not yet what it is.Less

A Voice That Is Not Mine: Terror and the Mythology of the Technological Voice

Tom Gunning

in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

The human voice carried through technology (the phonograph, the radio, the cinema) becomes in effect disembodied, separated from the living human being that originally produced it. Such technological ... More

The human voice carried through technology (the phonograph, the radio, the cinema) becomes in effect disembodied, separated from the living human being that originally produced it. Such technological mediation redefined not only the embodied nature of the voice but its spatial nature. Radio signals could pass over the airwaves ignoring national borders. Further, this free-floating voice took on uncanny psychological effects, seeming to invade the consciousness of the hearer. The early sound films of Fritz Lang, such as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), explored the narrative possibilities of this disembodied technological voice, as did his unfilmed script LB2 in which the voice of Hitler seems to persist on the airwaves after his death.Less

The Sublime Landscape

Xon De Ros

in The Poetry of Antonio Machado: Changing the Landscape

Because landscape involves perspective, both physical and cultural, it carries an ideological component which this chapter explores in relation to models of the sublime. From the natural sublime, a ... More

Because landscape involves perspective, both physical and cultural, it carries an ideological component which this chapter explores in relation to models of the sublime. From the natural sublime, a nineteenth-century aesthetic category related to landscape and vision, the analysis includes other conceptualizations of sublimity connected with Machado’s poetics, both in terms of rhetorical discourse and as a structure of feeling. Furthermore, drawing from Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, the chapter also explores the ways in which Machado’s poetry absorbs and reproduces (and also deflects) cultural authority though a dynamic engagement with the poetic tradition. The final section focuses on Machado’s romancero ‘La tierra de Alvargonzález’ in relation to deconstructive criticism and the poetics of the uncanny, to show how Machado’s eco-poetics clashes with the ideology of the sublime.Less

Life Forces: Theoretical Perspectives

Douglas J. Davies

in Mors Britannica: Life Style & Death Style in Britain Today

Chapter 1 describes lifeforces driving the interplay between vitality and mortality in the physical and social nature of human bodies. The topics of meaning-making, embodiment, ‘sense of presence’, ... More

Chapter 1 describes lifeforces driving the interplay between vitality and mortality in the physical and social nature of human bodies. The topics of meaning-making, embodiment, ‘sense of presence’, the sacred, and the ‘uncanny’ are all shown to contribute to human identity and are illustrated here through historical and literary material from Thomas Hobbes to George Herbert and R. L. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, while the historical figure of Sir Thomas Browne is introduced as a key British source framing the study of death, ritual, and belief. To account for the flourishing of identity, this chapter sets the new idea of ‘moral–somatic’ relationships alongside established notions of the dual-sovereignty model of jural and mystical authority, reciprocity or gift theory, and cultural intensification and ritual. Further theoretical strength is drawn from ideas of elective affinity and paradigmatic scenes as ways of depicting lifeforces driving lifestyle and death-style.Less

The Irish Uncanny and the American Gothic

Juliet Shields

in Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835

In the wake of the 1798 United Irishmen’s uprising and the passing of the Alien and Sedition Acts, American and Irish novelists used the conventions of the Gothic to represent Irish radicals in the ... More

In the wake of the 1798 United Irishmen’s uprising and the passing of the Alien and Sedition Acts, American and Irish novelists used the conventions of the Gothic to represent Irish radicals in the United States and in Ireland as uncanny—at once foreign and familiar, homeless and at home. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) reveal that, in the United States, Irish radicals recalled the nation’s recent revolutionary past even while they were associated with the foreign threats of Jacobinism, Catholicism, and the European Illuminati. Maria Regina Roche’s The Munster Cottage Boy (1820) suggests that in Ireland these radicals manifested a patriotism that Britain had tried to expunge but that reappeared in ghostly, half-hidden forms to remind the Irish of their political and cultural heritage.Less