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Sigmund Freud takes up this question in a 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” and his thoughts on the subject are still useful 100 years later. In this lesson, I want to sketch out his definition of this special kind of fear and then show you how you might apply it to your own readings of literature.
What does the word uncanny mean? How does the uncanny appear in literature? Professor Ray Malewitz answers these questions using examples from Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, and common horror films.
Nov 1, 2023 · As exhibited by Twin Peaks, the uncanny can be described as the feeling we experience when a certain event, person, or place is strangely familiar, or when the familiar is made strange; this eerie feeling may unsettle or frighten us.
Feb 20, 2014 · In his The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as “Something that was long familiar with the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (Introduction xlii), and goes on to discuss how the uncanny deals specifically with “our own cultures past that haunts us.”
Feb 22, 2021 · Entire tropes in Gothic literature are based around the uncanny, such as the trope of the doppelganger. In this trope, the familiar and the familiar-made-unfamiliar are embodied in two separate characters that both mirror and diverge from each other.
An uncanny place: locus suspectus; at an uncanny time of night: intempesta nocte. Greek: (Rost's and Schenkl's Lexikons). Eeros (i.e., strange, foreign). English: (from the dictionaries of Lucas, Bellows, Flumlgel and Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow.
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What does uncanny mean in Freud's essay?
Literature is uncanny. What does this mean? To try to define the uncanny is immediately to encounter one of its decisive paradoxes, namely that it has to do with a troubling of definitions, with a fundamental disturbance of what we think and feel.
