Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

In 1922 Sigmund Freud wrote to fellow Viennese author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler: ‘I believe I have avoided you out of a sort of fear of my double’. Through a series of reflections on this imagined doubling and its reception, this paper demonstrates that the ambivalent desire for his literary other attested by Freud's confession goes to the heart of both theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of psychoanalysis. Bringing Schnitzler's resistance to Freud into conversation with attempts by psychoanalytically oriented literary scholars to affirm the Doppengängertum of the two men, it argues that not only psychoanalytic theories and modernist literature but also the tendency to identify the two must be treated as historical phenomena. Furthermore, the paper contends, Schnitzler's work stands in a more critical relationship to its Viennese milieu than Freud's: his examination of the vicissitudes of feminine desire in ‘Fräulein Else’ underlines the importance of what lies outside the oedipal narrative through which the case study of ‘Dora’ comes to be centered on the uncanny nexus of identification with and anxious flight from the other.

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Cosmic Passions

Deep Time, Dark Times ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823281367.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 36-46

Author(s):

David Wood

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

The Sublime ◽

The Uncanny ◽

The World ◽

At Home

Should imminent climate change provoke angst or despair? Hume tells us that “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” But which passions? A geophenomenology would begin by acknowledging the constitutive power of cosmic passions such as wonder, curiosity, and delight. Kant’s account of the sublime opens up a range of experiences with an intrinsic reflexive resonance. Stirred in with Heidegger’s connection between angst and freedom, it offers grounds for a certain hope. Heidegger’s sense that to be truly at home in the world we must experience something of the uncanny (Unheimlich) is wedded to the idea that our manner of dwelling can be transformed by adopting new narratives that free us from false desires.

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Appropriating Ovid’s Tyrannical Raptures in Macbeth

Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430067.003.0010 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 163-181

Author(s):

John D. Staines

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Deleuze And Guattari ◽

Titus Andronicus ◽

Human Culture ◽

The Sublime ◽

The Uncanny ◽

Human Understanding

In contrast to Titus Andronicus, Macbeth adapts few Ovidian sources; nonetheless, the play reveals how completely the mature Shakespeare appropriates Ovid’s poetics, especially the element of raptus, seizing and being seized. Macbeth himself is the body rapt, and raped, as he experiences the sublime terror of being swept up and violated by forces at the edge of human understanding. The tyrant is both the rapist and the raped, seized by passions he cannot, or will not, control, tortured in “restless ecstasy” that drives him to greater violations. Using the rhizome and assemblage of Deleuze and Guattari, and the hauntology of Derrida, this chapter sees Shakespeare, Ovid, and human culture as fragmentary records of violent appropriations and traumatized ghosts haunting past, present, and future. The uncanny, spectral experiences Maurizio Calbi finds in postmodern Shakespearean adaptations are thus intensifications of experiences Shakespeare found in Ovid and made central to his art.

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