Home Truths: The Importance of the Uncanny for Patrick Süskind's Critique of the Enlightenment inDas Parfum

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242
Author(s):  
Jonathan Woolley
Keyword(s):  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Uncanny

Doppelgamers: Video Games and Gothic Choice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hancock
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Virtual Realities

This chapter explores gothic elements encoded into the narrative and the very act of choice that govern video games. These elements both reinforce and expose the lie of rational choice that undergirds the neoliberal economy that saw games rise to media dominance. Videogames may be simulacra, but not just virtual realities: they are the uncanny symptom of how the neoliberal subject recognizes its own lack of identity. Games are thus the gothic double of the Enlightenment self, the prime image of the hollow American neoliberal consumer mass-marketed as self-fashioning individual.

scholarly journals From men to machines and back: Automata and the reception of virtuosity in European instrumental art music, c.1815-c.1850

New Sound ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Žarko Cvejić
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Automatic Technique

In most histories of Western music, the 1830s and 40s are typically described as "the age/era of virtuosity and/or virtuosi". Indeed, major contemporary sources, including leading musical journals of the time, teem with reports on the latest exploits of Liszt and his rivals and in much of this body of criticism, piano and violin virtuosi were commonly celebrated for pushing the limits of humanly conceivable excellence in musical performance. However, a significant number of these critical responses were also negative, critiquing individual virtuosi for playing not like humans, but like automata. My claim in this article, documented with a detailed perusal of contemporary music criticism, is that this line of anti-virtuosic critique was part of the larger 19th-century suspicion of virtuosity as super but also, perhaps, non-humanly accomplished, automatic technique, devoid of all emotion, expression, that is, of human presence and content. Also, I propose to interpret this line of criticism with reference to the even broader 19th-century anxiety over the issue of human subjectivity, that is, its freedom, evident not only in contemporary philosophy (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Novalis, etc.), but also in literature. Such narratives and, as I argue in this paper, much of contemporary criticism of virtuosity were shaped by the uncanny feeling that the human subject, too, like automata and "automatic" virtuosi, may not be free, contrary to the Enlightenment view of the human subject in Rousseau, Kant, and others, but actually under the power of mechanisms beyond itself, operating automatically and not of its own accord. In contemporary criticism of virtuosity, the elusive notions of expression, expressivity, expressive playing and the like, which were deliberately kept under-explained, were then marshalled to preserve the supposedly ineffable or at least ineffably human core of musical performance, in line with the contemporary Romantic view of music as the only means of expressing what is otherwise inexpressible, that is, ineffable.

Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

2022 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-86
Keyword(s):  
Visual Images ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Urban Decay

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

Saving the Self: Between the Enlightenment and the Deluge

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-660
Author(s):  
Mary Gergen
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Enlightenment

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Reading and Interpreting Variants inCome and Go,Va-et-vientandKommen und Gehen

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Pascale Sardin
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
French Translation ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Textual Variants ◽  
Insight Into

This paper focuses on textual variants in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen and considers these variants as thresholds (Genette, 1997) into these works. This paper aims to show how Beckett's self-translating process, which was prolonged and complicated in the case of his plays when he directed them himself, produces a number of possible textual confusions, but also how these complications constitute insight into the Beckettian text. Indeed variants and rewritings point to moments in the writing and rewriting process when Beckett met ‘resistant vitalities’ mentioned by George Steiner in After Babel (1975). To illustrate this, I study Beckett's first ‘dramaticule’, Come and Go, by examining its pre-texts, the French translation, and Beckett's production notebooks for Kommen und Gehen. In these texts, I explore the motifs of death and ocular anxiety, as studied by Freud in his famous paper on ‘The Uncanny.’ I show how the Freudian uncanny actually reveals the parodic archaism of Beckett's drama, as a parallel is drawn between the structure of Beckett's play and Greek tragedy. Beckett's sometimes ‘messy’ rewritings in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen served the performing intuitive perception in us of death, an issue explored here through the trope of femininity. Furthermore, comparing Beckett's Come and Go and Va-et-vient makes it easier to see Beckett progressing towards what Deleuze called a ‘theatre of metamorphoses and permutations’ in Difference and Repetition – a monograph published in France the very year Come and Go was first produced (1966).

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