Abstract
Exploring the links between Speculative Realism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this article examines OOO’s entanglement with the ‘uncanny’. Reading OOO against three notable treatments of the concept - Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’”, Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) - it argues that OOO reconfigures the ‘uncanny’ as a profoundly ontological concept premised on aesthetic enstrangement. Using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” as a case study, it assesses what the consequences of this reconfiguration are for literary criticism and, in particular, the study of the Gothic. By splicing OOO into the history and practice of Gothic scholarship, this article traces the outline of an “object-oriented uncanny”, pushing the ‘uncanny’ out of Freud’s shadow and into the “great outdoors”.
References
Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. “Gothic Criticism”. In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 209-228. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.10.1111/b.9780631206200.2001.00019.xSearch in Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999.Search in Google Scholar
Bernstein, Susan. “It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny”. In Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Gary Hall, 183-208. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.Search in Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. “Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity”. In Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, edited by Maud Ellmann, 173-195. London: Longman, 1994.Search in Google Scholar
Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.10.5749/minnesota/9780816678976.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.10.1057/9780230590823Search in Google Scholar
Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)”. New Literary History, vol. 7, no. 3 (1976), 525–645.Search in Google Scholar
Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. London: Harvard University Press, 1997.Search in Google Scholar
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’”. In The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 14, Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, edited by Albert Dickson, 335-376. London: Penguin, 1985.Search in Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “The Unconscious”. In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-16): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, translated under the General Editorship of J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. 1957.Search in Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Evan. Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.10.1515/9780748691425Search in Google Scholar
Groom, Nick. The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.10.1093/actrade/9780199586790.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Hamilton, Grant. The World of Failing Machines: Speculative Realism and Literature. Winchester: Zero Books, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human”. Naked Punch. 9 (2007), 21-30.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Dante’s Broken Hammer: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics of Love. London: Repeater Books, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “Freud’s Wolf-Man in an Object-Oriented Light”. In The Neurotic Turn: Interdisciplinary Correspondences on Neurosis, edited by Charles Johns. London: Repeater Books, 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “Global Finitude”. In The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy, edited by Anthony Morgan, 253-270. Newcastle: Bigg Books, 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2005.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Winchester: Zero Books, 2012.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl”. In Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Vol. IV, edited by Robin Mackay, 332-365. Falmouth: Urbanomic. 2012.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “Poe’s Black Cat”. In Romanticism and Speculative Realism, edited by Chris Washington and Anne McCarthy, 217-235. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.10.5040/9781501336416.ch-011Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Speculative Realism: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism”. New Literary History. 43:2 (2012), 183-203.10.1353/nlh.2012.0016Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books, 2010.Search in Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. London: Yale University Press, 2000.Search in Google Scholar
Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Sandman. Translated by Peter Wortsman. London: Penguin, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, translated by Roy Sellars. In Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis, 216-228. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Search in Google Scholar
Killeen, Jarlath. Gothic Literature: 1825-1914. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.Search in Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon, and C. Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness: and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912.Search in Google Scholar
Luckhurst, Roger. “Psychoanalysis”. In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes et al., 526-530. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.Search in Google Scholar
Massé, Michelle. “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic”. In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 229-241. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.10.1111/b.9780631206200.2001.00020.xSearch in Google Scholar
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Search in Google Scholar
Morgan, Anthony. “Introduction”. The Kantian Catastrophe: Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy, edited by Anthony Morgan, 9-28. Newcastle: Bigg Books, 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Morlock, Forbes. “Doubly Uncanny: An Introduction to ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’”. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2:1 (1997), 17-21.10.1080/09697259708571911Search in Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry”. New Literary History. 43:2 (2012), 205-224.10.1353/nlh.2012.0018Search in Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London: Verso, 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013.Search in Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.10.4159/9780674056732Search in Google Scholar
Punter, David. “Shape and Shadow: On Poetry and the Uncanny”. In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 193-206. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.Search in Google Scholar
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day; Vol. 1, The Gothic Tradition. Harlow: Longman, 1996.Search in Google Scholar
Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, edited and translated by Harry Tucker Jr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971.Search in Google Scholar
Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.Search in Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2015.Search in Google Scholar
Walpole, Horace. “Walpole to William Cole, 9 March 1765”. In The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, Vol. I, edited by W.S. Lewis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-1983.Search in Google Scholar
Willems, Brian. Speculative Realism and Science Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422697.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Withy, Katherine. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.10.4159/9780674286771Search in Google Scholar
Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. London: Macmillan, 2001.Search in Google Scholar
Wrathall, Mark. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.10.1017/CBO9780511777974Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 H.G. Bartholomew, published by De Gruyter Open
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
