Uncanny Perspectives in Literature and Culture Texts, Images, Experiences

This collection of essays aims to analyse the uncanny as a concept developed in the field of the arts, from a variety of perspectives axed in the literary field, in the media context, and in film studies, with references to contemporary thought. The book aims to provide readers with a methodological updating on this psychoanalytic concept, starting from its basic rethinking, under the light of the different cultural backgrounds of the authors whose essays are collected.

The book’s specific focus is in the research on the many faces the uncanny took in different experiences, forms of writing, ideas of art, theories, discourses, and experiences in creation. This shows, still today, not only the concept’s richness in defining our contemporary cultural context, but also its plasticity and its identity of notion-hinge between eras, ideas of representation, and forms of writing of various types.

Part I: Post Humanism.- Chapter 1: Murderbot and the Uncanny: The Familiar Unfamiliarity of Non-Human Humanity by Kellyn Stinnett.- Chapter 2: “Machines like us”: an overview of A.I. and human nature by Tiziana Lentini.- Part II: Uncanny Bodies and the Human.- Chapter 3: Looking at Iconography of Ophelia to Understand the Uncanny in the Beautiful Dead Girl Trope by Danielle Byington.- Chapter 4: Yoko Tawada’s “The Emissary”: An Aesthetic Leap Towards a Queer and Uncanny Ecology by Valentina Rosales.- Chapter 5: Documenting pain through love. “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath by Carlotta Berti.- Chapter 6: Dostoevsky’s ‘Uncanny’ Disease by Byron Byrne Taylor.- Part III: Visual Culture.- Chapter 7: “Blindspot” and “Avengers Infinity War” Translating Uncanny Geographies in Television and Film: Repetition, Doubling, and The Twin Towers by Loraine Haywood.- Chapter 8: Uncanny synaesthesia(s): the interplay between forms, sounds, and colours in Samuel Beckett’s “Play” and Wassily Kandinsky’s “In Grey by Abdellatif Ben Halima.- Chapter 09: Thin Places, Other Worlds and Visual Layering in Cinema by Chris Gerrard.- Chapter 10: Fluidity in Stillness: Jean Epstein’s Uncanny ‘Photogénie’ and the Found Footage Film by Anna Louise Wiegenstein.- Chapter 11: Uncanny Objects: Lacan, Heidegger, and Return of the Gaze by Matilda Cullen and Cameron More.- Part IV: Spatiality.- Chapter 12: The Contemporary Uncanny after Brexit: Literary Disruptions of the Self by Mandy Beck.- Chapter 13: The Uncanny, Unsurmountable Beliefs and Postrevolutionary Mexico in Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos monjes by Kevin Anzzolin.- Part V: The ‘Uncanny’ Trope.- Chapter 14: Portrait of the Uncanny in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore by Jamie Johnson.- Chapter 15: Haruki Murakami’s use of the Uncanny in “After Dark” (2004): the corruption of the home space and the subjugation of the female characters by Gemma Scammell.- Part VI: The Self and the Other: Uncanny Limits.- Chapter 16: Love, Death and Femme Fatales in Keats’ Works by Federica Montella.- Chapter 17: The Mimic and the Uncanny: Reading Waste in “English, August” by Sonakshi Srivastava.

Gabriele Biotti is a research staff member and lecturer at London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, UK. He has published books and articles on modern cinema, on film aesthetics, on the dialogues between cinema and history and between film and modern thought, on the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, Éric Rohmer, Chris Marker, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, among others. He is the editor-in-chief on online academic journal IDEA-Interdisciplinary Discourses, Education and Analysis.

I.Vinitha Chandra is presently working as Research Guide, Assistant Professor and Coordinator for Post Graduate Studies - MA English Literature in the PG and Research Department of English, Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru, India. Her research interest includes Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies, Writing, Ecology, and the Environment in Literature, and Indian Literature.

Nacera Haouchine is a full-time PhD student in International Relations at the University of Keele, UK. She is based in the School of Social, Political and Global Studies (SPGS). Her research focuses on Migration and Security Studies.