Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties

243 Pages·2008·0.9 MB·English

by  John Jervis

Uncanny Modernity
Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties
Edited by
Jo Collins and John Jervis
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Uncanny Modernity
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Uncanny Modernity
Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties
Edited by
Jo Collins
and
John Jervis
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Introduction,selection and editorial matter © Jo Collins and John Jervis 2008
Individual chapters © contributors 2008
All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988,or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of
this work in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2008 by
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ISBN-13:978–0–230–51771–4 hardback
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Uncanny modernity:cultural theories,modern anxieties / edited by
Jo Collins and John Jervis.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–230–51771–4 (alk.paper)
1. Psychology.2. Experience.3. Supernatural.4. Culture—
Psychological aspects.5. Postmodernism.—Psychological aspects.
I.Collins,Jo,1978– II.Jervis,John,1946–
BF57.U53 2008
155.9—dc22 2008000186
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe,Chippenham and Eastbourne
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Contents
Notes on the Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Jo Collins and John Jervis
1 Uncanny Presences 10
John Jervis
2 Night and the Uncanny 51
Elisabeth Bronfen
3 Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting
the Modern Optical Uncanny 68
Tom Gunning
4 As It Happened … Borderline, the Uncanny and
the Cosmopolitan 91
James Donald
5 Access Denied: Memory and Resistance
in the Contemporary Ghost Film 112
Scott Brewster
6 The Uncanny After Freud: The Contemporary
Trauma Subject and the Fiction of Stephen King 128
Roger Luckhurst
7 ‘Neurotic Men’ and a Spectral Woman: Freud, Jung
and Sabina Spielrein 146
Jo Collins
8 The Urban Uncanny: The City, the Subject,
and Ghostly Modernity 168
Julian Wolfreys
9 Profane Illuminations, Delicate and
Mysterious Flames: Mass Culture
and Uncanny Gnosis 181
Michael Saler
v
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vi Contents
10 Terrorism and the Uncanny, or, The Caves of Tora Bora 201
David Punter
11 Document:
‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906): Ernst Jentsch 216
Translated by Roy Sellars
Index 229
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Notes on the Contributors
Scott Brewster is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Central Lancashire. Author of numerous articles on the Gothic and psy-
choanalysis, he also edited Inhuman Reflections:Rethinking the Limits of the
Human(Manchester University Press, 2000) and edited and introduced
the 2002 Wordsworth Classics edition of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in
White.
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Literature at
the University of Zurich. Her publications include Over Her Dead Body:
Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992)
and The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton
University Press, 1998). She is currently working on a cultural history of
the night, forthcoming with Columbia University Press, 2009.
Jo Collins is a Teaching Assistant in Cultural Studies and English and
American Literature at the University of Kent. She has published articles
on Australian Literature and colonialism. She is currently researching
and writing in the field of the colonial uncanny.
James Donald is Professor of Film Studies at the University of New
South Wales. His publications include Imagining the Modern City
(Athlone, 1999) and, with others, Close-Up, 1927–33: Cinema and
Modernism (Cassell, 1998). He has also coedited The Sage Handbook of
Film Studies(Sage, 2008).
Tom Gunningis Professor of Media and Film Studies at the University
of Chicago. He is the author of numerous articles on early cinema and
the culture of modernity, including the impact of spiritualism, and has
published The Films of Fritz Lang(BFI, 2000).
John Jervisis a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of
Kent. He has published Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture
and Civilization (Blackwell, 1998) and Transgressing the Modern:
Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness (Blackwell, 2000). He
is currently writing Sensational Subjects: Modernity and the Spectacle of
Feeling.
vii
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viii Notes on the Contributors
Roger Luckhurst is a Senior Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College,
University of London. He is the author of The Invention of Telepathy
(Oxford University Press, 2002), Science Fiction (Polity, 2005) and The
Trauma Question(Routledge, 2008), and has edited Late Victorian Gothic
Tales(Oxford World Classics, 2005).
David Punteris Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol.
His books include, in two volumes, Literature of Terror (Longman, 1996),
and he has edited the collection Companion to Gothic (Blackwell, 2000).
He has recently published Modernity(Palgrave, 2007).
Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California
(Davis). He has written articles on modern European intellectuals and
cultural history and is the author of The Avant-Garde in Interwar England
(Oxford University Press, 1999).
Roy Sellars is currently a Senior Lecturer in English at the University
of Southern Denmark, Kolding. He has published on Hegel, Freud,
Adorno, Derrida, and Bloom, among others; and his works include a
co-translation of a major work by Renate Lachmann as Memory and
Literature(University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Julian Wolfreys is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Loughborough. His books include Writing London vol. II:
Memory, Materiality, Spectrality(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Victorian
Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002).
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Introduction
Jo Collins and John Jervis
The uncanny is an experience of disorientation, where the world in
which we live suddenly seems strange, alienating or threatening. Our
study proposes to examine and interrogate the qualities that charac-
terise uncanny experiences and the cultural contexts which permit
ostensibly rational people to encounter such unnerving feelings, explor-
ing how these experiences have been portrayed in literature and film,
and how they can be theorised. We ask – where does the uncanny come
from? Why does it keep returning? Could it be that the uncanny is a dis-
tinctively modernexperience?
While the uncanny has of course been significant as a theme in liter-
ature since at least the high Gothic, it is Freud’s paper of 1919 that has
become the key cultural resource. This paper itself led a suitably subter-
ranean twilight existence for its first half century, then staging a dra-
matic return from the 1970s, becoming widely read throughout the
humanities and cultural studies, on both sides of the Atlantic. Here it
has converged with a second stream of influence, deriving most directly
from Walter Benjamin – and ultimately from Marx – locating the
uncanny in relation to the ‘phantasmagoria’ of city life, the transfor-
mation of the urban world into a visual and spatial spectacle inhabited
also by the shadowy hauntings of the fleeting and insubstantial, in turn
relating to what could be called the ‘technological uncanny’, the sug-
gestion that photo, film and phone have all been resources through
which the uncanny presence of a disturbing otherness is revealed.
Given a further fillip by the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx in
1994, the influence of the uncanny throughout the academy was such
that by 1998 Martin Jay could refer to it as the ‘master trope’ of the
decade.1 The continued spread of ‘uncanny studies’ now involves a
range of fields from the humanities,2through architecture,3queer studies,4
1