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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.
Synonyms for UNCANNY: mysterious, cryptic, mystic, enigmatic, enigmatical, obscure, unexplainable, deep; Antonyms of UNCANNY: understandable, intelligible, apparent, obvious, evident, unmistakable, clear, manifest.
- The words eerie and weird are common synonyms of uncanny. While all three words mean "mysteriously strange or fantastic," uncanny implies disquieti...
- The words eerie and uncanny are synonyms, but do differ in nuance. Specifically, eerie suggests an uneasy or fearful consciousness that mysterious...
- Although the words weird and uncanny have much in common, weird may imply an unearthly or supernatural strangeness or it may stress peculiarity or...
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.
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.
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
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.
The uncanny is the space between reality and unreality, one certainty and another certainty, object and perception, remembering and forgetting; it is the threshold, at once neither of them, Mike Kelley, 'In Conversation with Thomas McEvilley' in The Sublime, pp. 201-204, (p. 204).
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