From cfp.english.upenn.edu…
“The Other Daemonic: Estranging the Uncanny”
Brown University Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference
March 20-21, 2015
Keynote: Prof. Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania
contact email: browncomplitgradconference@yahoo.com
Have we started to feel at home in the uncanny? A feeling so singular, yet so hard to define, the uncanny has become quite familiar to literary criticism. Freud’s 1919 essay on the subject opened the fields of psychoanalysis and literary studies to a proliferation of interest on anxiety, repetition, doubling, and the instability of the self. The uncanny has also enjoyed critical purchase in fields as diverse as Marxism, trauma studies, and linguistics. But after nearly a century of readings and rereadings of Freud’s essay, has the uncanny become an all too legible experience? Instead of evading our understanding and triggering uncertainty, has the uncanny become clearly identifiable? How might we continue the impetus of Freud’s concept of the uncanny without simply repeating his theses from 1919?
Considering global anxieties over rapid technological advancement, unnatural ecological conditions, unstable national borders, and the return of the (colonial) repressed via terrorism and war, the 21st century is haunted by echoes of previous ones. What kind of responsive relation to the world does the uncanny help us account for–and what relations does it overlook? Our conference will open a space for new considerations of the uncanny for literary criticism and critical theory. What happens when the stock tropes of the uncanny – the automaton, the (haunted) house, the double, the ghost – turn up in unfamiliar places? We are particularly interested in reading papers that address:
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Alternative genealogies and manifestations of the uncanny (departures from a post- Enlightenment or otherwise Eurocentric tradition)
Being at home in the post-national, diasporic, or displaced world
The double as a queer trope of identification or sameness
Fantastic, speculative, and magical realisms
The creeping arrival of climate change or the unnatural natural world
Animal “familiars”
Inhumanity and posthumanism
The denaturalized or possessed body
The automaton and automatized life forms in the digital age
Repetition compulsion and mass media (re-tweeting, 24/hour news cycles, etc.)
Please send a 250-word abstract by January 1, 2015 to BrownCompLitGradconference@yahoo.com.
[Sounds like a wonderful conference. I’m already promised to attend the ICFA-36 at the time this conference will transpire, but I encourage researchers who work on the uncanny to submit and I am hopeful there will be online coverage of some kind.]
