Uncanny Presences

Jervis, John

doi:10.1057/9780230582828_2

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…I focus on the uncanny of the second type, which lurks in the distance, 'gap' , or 'empty space' between modernity's binaries (Jervis, 2008: 11). This uncanny necessarily disturbs the boundaries between self/other, allowing an unsettling slippage between the two (Jervis, 2008; see also Gunning, 2008). Freud, 1997: 210) explicates the self/other slippage through the concept of the 'double' , which he defines as the 'doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self' , or the primitive part of the self that returns as a spectral mirroring.…”

Section: Images Of Black Suffering and Death: Self/other And The Unca...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence

Dubuisson

2022

Journal of Visual Culture

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The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates within specific histories, discourses, and affective relationships, this article examines a particular collection of images: the Time magazine photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims. The article argues that the photos evoke the uncanny by using the Haitian zombie motif – an image of ‘monstrous’ black racial difference. The article traces the photos’ elicitation of the uncanny in two ways: one, it highlights how the images produce self/other slippages and thus affirm the uncanny; and two, it examines the insidious and violent ways these slippages dehumanize, dismember, and dispossess those depicted to produce a ‘negative familiarity’ for the non-black observer, thus lending to the banality of antiblack violence. The article ends with a call for ‘radical empathy’ to combat this violence.

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Section: Images Of Black Suffering and Death: Self/other And The Unca...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence

Dubuisson

2022

Journal of Visual Culture

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“…How that irruption occurs can be questioned though. As Jervis (2008) suggests, the uncanny either enters an ordinary, rational world or the irruption reveals that the uncanny was already present in that world. To be clear, and despite these overlaps, the characters and situations that my focus is upon here evoke the 'terror' of the 'everyday' and not the 'horror' of the supernatural.…”

Section: Horror Terror and The Abjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing Funny Games in The Last House on the Left: The uncanny and the ‘home invasion’ genre

Fiddler

2013

Crime, Media, Culture

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This article dredges the 'reservoirs of dogma' and 'symbolic lagoons of social fears' to locate the 'home invasion' film genre within its diachronic and synchronic contexts. As such, we will first situate these films as part of the historical tradition of Gothic literature. This allows us to unpack the ways in which the depictions of the 'home' and 'homeliness' in Gothic literature and the 'home invasion' genre problematise constructions of identity and category formation. Secondly, exploring the genre in its contemporaneous socio-cultural setting allows us to see how particular social traumas are manifest in popular culture. These dimensions are explored by focusing on three key examples and their subsequent remakes: The Last House on the Left, Straw Dogs and Funny Games.

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“…The uncanniness that emerges into the ordinariness of reality is at the heart of a theory of the uncanny elaborated in Jervis (2008). "We could refer […] to an 'uncanny realism': the world has to be fundamentally ordinary before being invested with an uncanny aura; or, the uncanny works through the ordinariness of the world, even produced by it, as though a de-sacralised, disenchanted world becomes uncanny in its very essence" (p.28).…”

Section: Fatal Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Which is to say that the uncanny is itself a strange theoretical register of which there is a heterodoxy of interpretations and uses. It has been treated in psychology/psychoanalysis by Jentsch (1995) and Freud (1955b), from a feminist perspective in Zwinger (1992) and DeLamotte (1990), literary criticism in Todorov (1973) and Armstrong (1995), contemporary art Grenville (2001), film theory in Žižek (1991) and Gunning (2008), cultural theory in Jervis (2008) and Saler (2008), architectural theory in Vidler (1994), and colonial studies in Collins (2008). The concept of uncanny tends to bleed over into other concepts as well, like Derrida's specter and trace, Todorov's fantastic, Lacan's extimité and even the Kantian sublime, all of which leads one to believe that the uncanny as an analytic term is about as ambiguous as the phenomena it attempts to describe.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Strange Reality: On Glitches and Uncanny Play

Holmes¹

2010

EJCGC

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Videogames have had to struggle with balancing the requirements of 'good' gameplay with a drive toward increasing graphical and narrative realism, spurred on by constantly improving technologies of simulation and computer graphics. Despite these advances in hardware and programming techniques, videogames' simulations of reality have, for the most part, remained crude and cartoonish next to the allegorical richness of description in art, literature and film-a comparison that may be unfair, but nevertheless has been relentlessly repeated. This paper attempts to highlight some of the difficulties and failures of realism in videogames through the lens of the uncanny, which, it is argued, should be understood as an essential trait of videogames in their capacity as simulations of realities, and as modern technology.

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Uncanny Presences

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence

The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence

Playing Funny Games in The Last House on the Left: The uncanny and the ‘home invasion’ genre

Strange Reality: On Glitches and Uncanny Play

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