Uncanny Research Articles

A verossimilhança da familiaridade do não familiar na ficção antiga e moderna

<p>O texto comenta os conceitos de <em>não familiar </em>ou <em>estranho </em>tratados por Freud em <em>Das Unheimliche </em>(1919), associando-os ao hábito e às rupturas do hábito para especificar a diferença da sua ocorrência na experiência individual, em que é significante de uma angústia, e na ficção, em que é figuração intencional. Distinguindo a figuração do não familiar na ficção antiga e na ficção moderna, propõe que na ficção antiga, como a de Luciano de Samósata, o não familiar é classificado platônica e aristotelicamente como fantástico, e na ficção moderna, como a de Beckett, como efeito da crítica e destruição dos regimes de verdade e verossimilhança que fundam a representação.</p>

Artur Lescher's Grammar

The article aims at contributing to the characterisation of the works or artistic imagery of Artur Lescher. It highlights the purity of its forms that results from non-compositional structures while integrating in its grammar elements of tension, both between materials in the same work and among the works in the gallery they are once arranged. It also associates this grammar to semantics, relating his works to the child's imagination, since some of its forms refer back to old toys, while in others refer to the idea of repetition, to the game itself. Given this array of constructive work that leads, however, to the allegory, the spectator is asked to unravel the puzzle image, in an attempt to quell the unrest that results from what is also familiar and strange to (Das Unheimliche). It is in this aspect that the power of negativity, social or political criticism of his art resides.

Behind Closed Doors: The Theatrical Uncanny and the Panoptical Viewer in the Dramas of Wilkie Collins

Behind Closed Doors: The Theatrical Uncanny and the Panoptical Viewer in the Dramas of Wilkie Collins

Without a Thought

Intuition is rooted in the brain's uncanny ability to rapidly know the answer without knowing why

American Uncanny

American Uncanny

Das unheimliche and women: The case of the tales of Hoffmann

This paper analyses Freud's concept of Das Unheimliche used to describe a strange proximity between the known and the unknown, whether as something acquainted represents itself with an extraneous shape or as something extraneous discovers an element of intimacy in itself. Freud inaugurated this concept in the text Das Unheimliche in 1919 referring to cases in which the subject in relation to objects or events has feelings that range from usual closeness to the point of utter automated perception, when an object or event appears strange. The automatism of repetition is only one of manifestations of Das Unheimliche. Freud wrote this text responding to the text by Ernest Jentsch's "On the Psychology of Des Unheimlichen" ("Uber die Psychologie des Unheimlichen") from 1906 arguing on the importance and significance of the doll Olympia in Hoffmann's story "The Sandman". The position of Olympia - whether she was seen as alive or as a machine - remained the main issue in late discussions of various authors. Therefore, Das Unheimliche and women are very closely related, not only because the concept is based on the female character of Olympia from the story, but also because Freud himself emphasized the Das Unheimliche character of the female body. The paper discusses the relation between Das Unheimliche and women, and reconsiders the relation between Das Unheimliche aspects of female characters in The Tales o f Hoffmann. Short stories "The Sandman", "Councillor Krespel" and "A New Year's Eve Adventure" were also chosen by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré for the opera "Tales of Hoffmann" by Jacques Offenbach, in which the leading roles of Stela, Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta are in fact one woman who takes a variety of forms.

The Interplay of the Domestic and the Uncanny in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

The Interplay of the Domestic and the Uncanny in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

The Place and Time of the Uncanny

Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche) stands at the center of reflections on the uncanny art of reading and the points at which the aesthetic meets the psychological. The essay, published in 1919, reflects Freud’s disjointed experience of being in the world in the wake of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg empire. It is an experience that he accesses through the act of reading literature (E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”), revealed as an emotional engagement with vague feelings of anxiety that he characterizes as “uncanny.” Freud works both with and against Ernst Jentsch’s “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” from 1906, in which Jentsch describes feelings of the uncanny as “intellectual uncertainty” that results from “lack of orientation” (2). Skirting the boundaries between etymological analysis, literary criticism, theory, autobiography, and medical treatise, it is not surprising that Freud’s essay continues to fascinate scholars of literature and those who relish Freud’s failed attempts at cohesion for the unexpected connections they invite. By connecting the essay to theories of anxiety and trauma in Freud’s other works, this essay reads the uncanny as signifying much more than simply “the return of the repressed.”

From The Lodger (1913) to From Hell (2001): Uncanny Portraits of Jack the Ripper?

From The Lodger (1913) to From Hell (2001): Uncanny Portraits of Jack the Ripper?

Performare il perturbante Una proposta di definizione del fantastico teatrale contemporaneo a partire dall’unheimlich di Freud

Does a fantastic form in exist in experimental theatre? This essay starts from the Freudian concept of Das Unheimliche to analyze the latest considerations suggested by literary critics. The argument derives from a multidisciplinary perspective including not only theatrical studies but also aesthetic ones and psychoanalytical research on the uncanny, aiming to build a critical base that will be a useful landmark for some preliminary considerations about Italian contemporary experimental theatre. The essay therefore proposes an approach linking research about the uncanny with the semiological analysis of the constitutive elements of postdramatic theatre, with the aim of defining what the constitutive elements of a theatrical uncanny-fantastic might be.

L'oggetto sguardo nell'insegnamento di Lacan

The eye occupies a central place in the teaching of Jacques Lacan. In particular, it finds its almost final formulation in Seminar X (1962-63) and Seminar XI (1964). In these Seminars the field of vision is no longer the place of illusion and mirage of the subjective identity, but it becomes the same field crossed by Freud’s Unheimlich , namely that of the sudden apparition of what is invisible. ‘Look’ is the name that Lacan gives to this appearance. The effects of what Lacan calls the ‘look function’ are: a radical alteration of the coordinates of the visual field and an effect of anguish. In such a perspective, the visual field becomes the proper place to radicalize the idea of the ‘subversion of the subject’: the subject doesn’t look, he/she is looked, the gaze looks at the subject, grabs him/her, and, in doing so, it determines the subject. Thus, Lacan reduces the subject to a claim, a need, that crosses and distorts the visual field. This distortion forces the subject to meet his/her condition of object. From this point of view, visual arts are a privileged territory to establish a certain relationship with the constant distortion of the eye (since aesthetics is, after all, ethics), therefore with that objectual condition that each subject embodies.

The Uncanny Marriage of Lacan and Electronic Art

The Uncanny Marriage of Lacan and Electronic Art

The Illumination of LEIMAY’s Becoming - Corpus

In Becoming - Corpus Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya have created a work about the misapprehensions of what appears before us followed by revelations of what we are able to see: illusion without magic or otherworldliness, fantastical imagery linking memory to the lurking presence of the uncanny.

Analysis of Grotesque Advertisement seen through Uncanny Concept

Analysis of Grotesque Advertisement seen through Uncanny Concept

The “Devil” in the Heart: Enchi Fumiko’s Onnamen and the Uncanny

Enchi Fumiko’s novel Onnamen (Female masks, 1958) has been the subject of various interpretations by Western scholars writing in English for nearly three decades. This article offers a different perspective on the novel by reading it in the light of Sigmund Freud’s essay “Das Unheimlich” (The uncanny, 1919). I argue that previous critics have not paid sufficient attention to the central male character, Ibuki Tsuneo, and his role in mediating our understanding of the central female character, Toganō Mieko, and that Mieko herself is a modern shamaness only in the sense that she is possessed by her own obsessions.

Processes of Repression: Image, Illusion, and the Uncanny

Processes of Repression: Image, Illusion, and the Uncanny

Effects of art practice subversion in spaces: Das Unheimliche focus

The paper considers subversive capacities of spaces in which art works are exhibited (museums, galleries) or spaces which they occupy (public spaces). This text is analyzing the spatial situations - interventions - artifacts coming from three different periods of time (Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the art practice of an American artist, Gordon Matta-Clark - precisely his 1975 work Day's End, and the work of a Columbian artist - Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, exhibited in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern Gallery in 2008) and trying to determine their subversion values examining their real/actual/manifested subversion strength in relation to ideologically false or 'fake' subversions. And, finally, the main objective is to explore the subversion of these artworks in the hindsight of Freud's Das Unheimliche where he made a point that 'something is terrifying not because it is unfamiliar, but because something that was known to us somehow became strange and unfamiliar'.

몸짓의 언캐니 연구 - 퀘이 형제의 작품을 중심으로 -

몸짓의 언캐니 연구 - 퀘이 형제의 작품을 중심으로 -

El retorno de lo ominoso: Conrad ante(s de) Freud

El presente ensayo tiene por objetivo indagar en el vinculo que se establece entre cultura y naturaleza en dos novelas de Joseph Conrad, El corazon de las tinieblas (1902) y Nostromo (1904). Nuestro interes reside en la posibilidad de comprender tal vinculo a partir de la idea de lo ominoso (das unheimliche) que Sigmund Freud desarrollara en 1919. Lo ominoso consiste en el retorno inesperado de lo reprimido, retorno que Conrad logro comprender magistralmente en las novelas senaladas, con bastante antelacion a Freud.

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross (review)

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross (review)