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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.
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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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.
I propose a definition of the uncanny: an anxious uncertainty about what is real caused by an apparent impossibility. First, I outline the relevance of the uncanny to art and aesthetics.
‘The Word of War’, ‘Telepathies,’ or ‘Disastrous Blanchot’). It invites relevant contributions across a wide range of intellectual disciplines on issues and writers belonging to or engaging the work of deconstructive thinking (such as Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, Levinas, Irigaray, and others).
- Jemma Deer
- 2020
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.
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uncanny is best thought of as comprising two distinct theories. What I want to show in this paper is that where return of the repressed fails to get us closer to understanding what is distinctive about uncanny phenomena, beyond the broad notion of ambivalence between the familiar and the unfamiliar, Freuds theory of surmounted primitive beliefs ...
