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 Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, for the English Association
This is a brilliant book...Royles 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
Royles 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 Danielewskis 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 its a fascinating and ambitious work.
–The Guardian, October 4, 2003
–Martin McQuillan, Editor of Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, for the English Association
This is a brilliant book...Royles 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
Royles 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 Danielewskis 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 its 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, parts ofjesus, legitimate fiction, uncanny seems, uncanny can, further page references, most uncanny thing, pronounce dead, intellectual uncertainty, phantom effects, uncanny strangeness, premature burial, death drive, live burial, distinction between imagination, omniscient narration, old mole, starred item, uncanny effect, whose bourn Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Spectres of Marx, Nicholas Royle, Jacques Dernda, Chicago University Press, Sigmund Freud, Peggy Kamuf, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Alan Bass, London Routledge, Geoffrey Bennington, The Post Card, Ernest Jones, Archive Fever, Harmondsworth Penguin, Monolingualism of the Other, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Strachey, Nag Hammadi, The State of the Debt, Derek Attridge, London Methuen, William Wilson, Acts of Literature New!
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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, parts ofjesus, legitimate fiction, uncanny seems, uncanny can, further page references, most uncanny thing, pronounce dead, intellectual uncertainty, phantom effects, uncanny strangeness, premature burial, death drive, live burial, distinction between imagination, omniscient narration, old mole, starred item, uncanny effect, whose bourn Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Spectres of Marx, Nicholas Royle, Jacques Dernda, Chicago University Press, Sigmund Freud, Peggy Kamuf, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Alan Bass, London Routledge, Geoffrey Bennington, The Post Card, Ernest Jones, Archive Fever, Harmondsworth Penguin, Monolingualism of the Other, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Strachey, Nag Hammadi, The State of the Debt, Derek Attridge, London Methuen, William Wilson, Acts of Literature 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
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Norton Library) by Sigmund Freud on 18 pages
- Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida on 9 pages
- The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics) by T.S. Eliot on 6 pages
- Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway on 6 pages
- The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions) by T. S. Eliot on 6 pages
See all 100 books this book cites
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