The uncanny is the weird, the strange, the mysterious, a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Even Freud, patron of the uncanny, had trouble defining it. Yet the uncanny is everywhere in contemporary culture. In this elegant book, Nicholas Royle takes the reader across literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as he marks the trace of the uncanny in the modern world. Not an introduction in the usual sense, Nicholas Royle's book is a geography of the uncanny as it manifests itself - and disturbs our thinking - in a range of disciplines.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Without doubt the outstanding book in critical and cultural theory published in 2003.
–Martin McQuillan, Editor of Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, for the English Association
This is a brilliant book...Royle's writing is astonishingly adventurous...The book is indispensable to any study of the uncanny and thus to any study of the literary...A critical tour de force.
–Textual Practice
[A] playful, scholarly study... densely and allusively argued, yet also full of pregnant one-liners...a fascinating and ambitious work.
–The Guardian
At last, a philosophical work that discusses ghosts and madness seriously. Royle, in a style that is warmly engaging right from the preface, speaks directly to the reader...For an academic book this is a hell of a page-turner...A compulsive book.
–pirandello.org.uk
Royle's playful, scholarly study of this protean idea collects essays on topics as various as Freud, moles (as in worthy pioneers rather than beauty spots), the Victorian fascination with being buried alive, cannibalism, the omniscient narrator of fiction as telepath, and doppelgängers (in which chapter he tells the amusing story of his own double, the novelist Nicholas Royle). The book is densely and allusively argued, yet also full of pregnant one-liners, such as this on
cinema: The entire 'industry' might be defined as a palliative working to repress the uncanniness of film. (What does Royle think of those recent masterpieces of the uncanny, Japanese horror film Ringu and Danielewski's novel House of Leaves ?) He also has fun making up words, using parenthesis marks to bracket empty space, and putting anecdotes in coffin-shaped boxes. Those allergic to Derrida, oft cited here, may bristle; but it's a fascinating and ambitious work.
–The Guardian, October 4, 2003
–Martin McQuillan, Editor of Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, for the English Association
This is a brilliant book...Royle's writing is astonishingly adventurous...The book is indispensable to any study of the uncanny and thus to any study of the literary...A critical tour de force.
–Textual Practice
[A] playful, scholarly study... densely and allusively argued, yet also full of pregnant one-liners...a fascinating and ambitious work.
–The Guardian
At last, a philosophical work that discusses ghosts and madness seriously. Royle, in a style that is warmly engaging right from the preface, speaks directly to the reader...For an academic book this is a hell of a page-turner...A compulsive book.
–pirandello.org.uk
Royle's playful, scholarly study of this protean idea collects essays on topics as various as Freud, moles (as in worthy pioneers rather than beauty spots), the Victorian fascination with being buried alive, cannibalism, the omniscient narrator of fiction as telepath, and doppelgängers (in which chapter he tells the amusing story of his own double, the novelist Nicholas Royle). The book is densely and allusively argued, yet also full of pregnant one-liners, such as this on
cinema: The entire 'industry' might be defined as a palliative working to repress the uncanniness of film. (What does Royle think of those recent masterpieces of the uncanny, Japanese horror film Ringu and Danielewski's novel House of Leaves ?) He also has fun making up words, using parenthesis marks to bracket empty space, and putting anecdotes in coffin-shaped boxes. Those allergic to Derrida, oft cited here, may bristle; but it's a fascinating and ambitious work.
–The Guardian, October 4, 2003
About the Author
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.
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Royle is absolutely brilliant as a writer and thinker. This book will teach psychoanalysts and any intellectual the complexity what it means to be human.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already haunted. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
deconstruction reading politics, telepathy effect, fausse reconnaissance, uncanny seems, legitimate fiction, uncanny can, déjà raconté, pronounce dead, intellectual uncertainty, most uncanny thing, archive fever, uncanny strangeness, phantom effect, death drive, premature burial, live burial, starred item, omniscient narration, distinction between imagination, uncanny effect, old mole Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Jacques Derrida, New York, Spectres of Marx, Nicholas Royle, Chicago University Press, Sigmund Freud, Peggy Kamuf, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Alan Bass, Geoffrey Bennington, Monolingualism of the Other, Ernest Jones, The Post Card, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Strachey, Jesus Christ, Nag Hammadi, Derek Attridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Hogarth Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, The State of the Debt New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already haunted. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
deconstruction reading politics, telepathy effect, fausse reconnaissance, uncanny seems, legitimate fiction, uncanny can, déjà raconté, pronounce dead, intellectual uncertainty, most uncanny thing, archive fever, uncanny strangeness, phantom effect, death drive, premature burial, live burial, starred item, omniscient narration, distinction between imagination, uncanny effect, old mole Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Jacques Derrida, New York, Spectres of Marx, Nicholas Royle, Chicago University Press, Sigmund Freud, Peggy Kamuf, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Alan Bass, Geoffrey Bennington, Monolingualism of the Other, Ernest Jones, The Post Card, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Strachey, Jesus Christ, Nag Hammadi, Derek Attridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Hogarth Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, The State of the Debt New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
See all 100 books this book cites
- Matter of the Heart Pb by Nicholas Royle on 9 pages
- Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: The Years of Maturity, 1901-19 v. 2 by Ernest Jones on 7 pages
- The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot on 6 pages
- The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics) by T.S. Eliot on 6 pages
- Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida on 6 pages
See all 100 books this book cites
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