The Uncanny

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Routledge, 2003 - Literary Criticism - 340 pages
This study is of the uncanny; an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche). Where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, silence, solitude and darkness, the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness, as well as more applied readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film and religion.

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Contents

an introduction
1
The Sandman
39
Literature teaching psychoanalysis
51
Copyright

21 other sections not shown

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About the author (2003)

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Telepathy and Literature (Routledge) and Deconstruction: A User's Guide. He is coeditor of The Oxford Literary Review.