Uncanny modernity : cultural theories, modern anxieties / edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Collins, Jo, 1978-

Jervis, John, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychology.

Experience.

Supernatural.

Culture--Psychological aspects.

Culture.

Postmodernism--Psychological aspects.

Postmodernism.

Physical Description:

viii, 234 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Summary:

The uncanny is an experience of disorientation, of something disturbing, so that our ordinary world seems suddenly strange, eerie. We ask - where does the uncanny come from? Why has it become a favourite figure for our simultaneous experience of the present as homeless and the past as haunting? And could it be that the uncanny is a peculiarly modern experience?

Challenging conventional disciplinary boundaries, this wide-ranging and illuminating collection of essays by scholars in literary, film and cultural studies pursues these issues through the modern city, the night, gender, trauma, modernism, early cinema, the ghost film, contemporary fiction and terrorism. Opening up the debate beyond Freud, the essays suggest that the uncanny testifies to a distinctive sensibility, calling for a cultural aesthetics of the modern experience, while inevitably subverting the serene confidence of any explanatory framework that seeks to capture it.

Contents:

Introduction / Jo Collins and John Jervis

Uncanny presences / John Jervis

Night and the uncanny / Elisabeth Bronfen

Uncanny reflections, modern illusions : sighting the modern optical uncanny / Tom Gunning

As it happened...Borderline, the uncanny and the cosmopolitan / James Donald

Access denied : memory and resistance in the contemporary ghost film / Scott Brewster

The uncanny after Freud : the contemporary trauma subject and the fiction of Stephen King / Roger Luckhurst

"Neurotic men" and a spectral woman : Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein / Jo Collins

The urban uncanny : the city, the subject, and ghostly modernity / Julian Wolfreys

Profane illuminations, delicate and mysterious flames : mass culture and uncanny gnosis / Michael Saler

Terrorism and the uncanny, or, the caves of Tora-Bora / David Punter

"On the psychology of the uncanny" (1906) : Ernst Jentsch / translated by Roy Sellars.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0230517714

9780230517714

OCLC:

191009652

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description