scholarly journals Between Science and Supernaturalism: Mimesis and the Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Culture

2017 ◽  
Vol 0 (24) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Goodall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Uncanny

scholarly journals Music and the Uncanny in the 19th Century

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Hentschel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Selection Criteria ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Subjective Opinion ◽  
The 19Th Century

This article explores the musical means composers in the nineteenth century used to evoke the uncanny (das Unheimliche). While most existing attempts to determine these means rely on an author’s subjective opinion with regard to particular evocations of the uncanny, this article draws exclusively on contemporary sources. Drawn from the RIPM database, thirteen examples have been selected—following Ernst Jentsch’s notion of the uncanny and based on a clearly defined set of selection criteria—from works by Weber, Loewe, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, Boito, and Ambroise Thomas. Compositional devices that recur in several of the works discussed prove to be of central importance. The article asks, finally, how these techniques generate the effect of the uncanny.

scholarly journals The Uncanny in the Themes of Evil, Transgression and the Double in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"

LETRAS ◽  
2006 ◽  
pp. 33-47
Author(s):  
Esteban Barboza Núñez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Human Component

El propósito de este artículo consiste en explorar los mecanismos y representaciones de lo siniestro en "La hija de Rappacci" de Nathaniel Hawthome como expresión del mal dentro de los límites del género gótico del siglo XIX; como expresión del tema del doble en tres personajes humanos y en uno no humano que aparecen en el cuento; y como expresión de trasgresión en el personaje principal, Giovanni Guasconte. El concepto de lo siniestro que se usará será el de la teoría psicoanalítica, siguiendo especialmente los aportes de Sigmund Freud y Jacques Lacan. The purpose of this artide is to explore the mechanisms and representations of the uncanny in Nathaniel Hawthome's "Rappaccini's Daughter" as an expression of evil within nineteenth century Gothic boundaries; as an expression of the theme of the double in three human characters and in one non-human component of Rappaccini's garden; and as an expression of transgression in Giovanni Guasconte, the main character. The concept of the uncanny to be used will be that of psychoanalytic theory, especially reliant on the contributions on the topic by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

The Music Behind the Mask: Rossini’s Uncanny Salon

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Simon Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
A Site ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Shed Light

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In these works, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” This paper establishes how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a musical “exhumation,” with his compositional activities functioning as a site for broader discourses about disease, aging, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex shed light on changing attitudes toward the composer, which coincided with broader aesthetic shifts taking place at the time. The tensions engendered by Rossini’s precarious status as both living and dead, and his nostalgic relationship to the past, constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential that has not yet been duly acknowledged.

“Pretty as a Picture”

Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Imene Gannouni Khemiri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Travel Accounts

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple’s Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair’s Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham’s Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for “Otherness.”

Re-reading Armenian Modernity in Madt‘ēos Mamurian’s English Letters

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Maral Aktokmakyan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article moves to examine Madt‘ēos Mamurian’s English Letters or the Destiny of an Armenian alongside issues of national consciousness and the modern political subject. Focusing on the narrative style and structure that allowed the author to problematize and cultivate the idea of reawakening the Armenian nation and individual as a political animal, the article claims to bring in the notion of the strange, stranger and the uncanny, as the operating tools in Mamurian’s engagement with the modern in a late nineteenth century Ottoman-Armenian context.

Chopin Dreams: The Mazurka in C# Minor, Op. 30, No. 4

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-260
Author(s):  
Michael Klein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Real ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Subject

Abstract This article views Chopin's Mazurka in C# Minor, op. 30, no. 4, as akin to a dream that is open to analysis from a Lacanian perspective. After a discussion of Jacques Lacan's famous orders of subjectivity (the imaginary, the symbolic order, and the Real), the article turns to his idea that a symptom is a message from the Real that demands interpretation. As such, strange moments in Chopin's Mazurka are like symptoms that require multiple interpretations in order to approach their hidden and overlapping meanings. The article proceeds to view Chopin's Mazurka through nineteenth-century notions of Orientalism (alterity), nationalism (nostalgia), coming to life (the automaton), tuberculosis (the boundary of life and death), and the uncanny (fragmentation of the body/mind). But just as Lacan argued that we can never reach a final meaning for a symptom, the article concludes that there can be no transcendental signified for the various symptomatic moments in Chopin's Mazurka. In the end, the Mazurka becomes what Lacan calls a sinthome, a form of subjectivity that is made up of the very symptoms that the subject strives to understand.

An Uncanny Theatricality: the Representation of the Offstage

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beliz Güçbilmez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
International Federation ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Invisible

In this article, Beliz Güçbilmez argues that ‘offstage’ is not a place but an idea, a world minus a stage. It is ‘anywhere but here’, and its time is time-minus-now, making it impossible to determine its scale. It is a foreign tongue – a language with an unknown grammar carrying us to the borders of the uncanny. Güçbilmez rereads the offstage as the unconscious of the stage, looking at its more conventional use in the realistic and naturalistic plays of the nineteenth century and after, but also looking forward to the work of Samuel Beckett. Borrowing from Blanchot's interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, she characterizes the Beckettian struggle to represent the unrepresentable as the act of bringing Eurydice into daylight – the invisible content of the offstage onto the stage, which is by definition the space of the gaze. Beliz Güçbilmez is an author, playwright, and translator, currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department of Ankara University in Turkey. She is the author of Irony and Drama from Sophocles to Stoppard (Ankara: Deniz, 2005) and Time, Space and Appearance: the Form of Miniature in the Turkish Realist Theatre (Ankara: Deniz, 2006). A shorter version of this article was presented at the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR) at its 2005 meeting in Krakow.

Dickens and Eucharist: Sacramental Medievalism in Bleak House

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-462
Author(s):  
Timothy Curran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Radical Form

This essay excavates a subterranean medieval presence in Dickens that squares the uncanny presence-in-absence of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth-century mind with the absent-present sacramental logic that animated the medieval mind. Medievalism properly understood, then, is an exercise more subtle and pervasive than a modern artist’s biased appropriation of a particular medieval topos: I contend that medievalism as a practice is sacramental. I argue that Dickens’s mobilization of medieval sacramentality reveals his participation in a radical form of medievalism concerned with activating and inhabiting traditional symbolic categories, and his interest in making these categories live again according to the very conceptual formulas in which they were originally imagined.

Flowers over the Abyss: A Musical Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Amanda Lalonde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ninth Symphony ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Definition Of

The term unheimlich (uncanny) comes into usage in German music criticism in the nineteenth century and is often used to describe instrumental music, particularly sections of works featuring the ombra topic. While the idea that instrumental music can be uncanny regardless of text or program is not novel, this work differs from most existing scholarship on the musical uncanny in that it presents a possible precursor to the twentieth-century psychoanalytic uncanny. Instead, it examines Schelling's definition of the uncanny in the larger context of his ideas in order to form a basis for theorizing a version of this aesthetic category that is active in the nineteenth-century critical discourse about music. In the early nineteenth century, music becomes uncanny because it discloses what should remain hidden from finite revelation. Critics understand passages of instrumental ombra music as uncanny moments when music calls attention to itself as the sensuous manifestation of the Absolute. They remark on these passages’ effacing of boundaries and sense of becoming, residues of eighteenth-century uses of the topic in operatic supernatural scenes and as part of a chaos-to-order narrative in symphonic music. The article concludes with the reception of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the finale of Schubert's Octet, D. 803, using critics’ comments as a basis for extrapolating, through new analyses, as to the features that might make the particular works remarkable as examples of music's uncanny power made manifest.

Unearthing the Spirit: The Archaeological Metaphor and the Uncanny Pathology of Romantic Ballet

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-186
Author(s):  
Liora Bing-Heidecker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Contemporary Perspective

This article draws on Théophile Gautier's dance writings and Sigmund Freud's psychological tenets to explore major concepts of the romantic ballet and argue that the latter presents a hitherto ignored link between two apparently detached disciplines: archaeology and psychoanalysis. The thesis suggests that the romantic ballet assimilated, via Gautier, the highly popular archaeological metaphor of the mid nineteenth century. Its resulting aesthetic therefore bears the distinct marks of the uncanny, a psychoanalytical notion formulated later, yet stimulated by the same archaeological inspiration. Consequently I contend that the romantic ballet anticipated and materialized some current critical notions such as liminality, ambiguity and hauntology, deriving from Freud's theories. Historicizing the ballerina as a personification of ballet's uncanny pathology offers a contemporary perspective on the romantic theatrical dance and illuminates its relevance to post modernist culture.

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