3 results
U
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 384-387
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Summary
THE UNCANNY
The uncanny is a term that troubles definitions. Ernst Jentsch's 1906 essay ‘On The Psychology of the Uncanny’ [Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen] ventured an equation of the uncanny with the unfamiliar, but it was Sigmund Freud who both popularised the term for modern usage and uncovered its ambiguity in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche). Freud shows that heimlich contains its own duality, as it means both the familiar, or homely, and the secret, or hidden: its ambivalence of meaning thus develops and coincides with the unheimlich, the unhomely. That paradox of the uncanny thus unfolds first in language and is captured in the signifier in which the concept is formalised. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ [Der Sandmann] as a case study, Freud demonstrates how what returns in the uncanny encounter with the Sandman, who threatens to remove children's eyes, is the suppression of a childhood fear of blinding resulting in the castration complex. The essay brings together PSYCHOANALYSIS and aesthetics in a literary reading that excavates Friedrich Schelling's definition, quoted by Freud, of the uncanny as a revelation of that which is hidden coming to light; building on Jentsch, Freud designates the uncanny not as the unfamiliar but as the affective sensation evoked by that class of things that are at once strange and known: objects and experiences of the uncanny retain a fundamental ambivalence, revealing in the frightening a repression of that which has already been.
READING
Freud, Sigmund (2001) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage, pp. 217–56.
Masschelein, Anneleen (2012) The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late Twentieth-Century Theory. New York: SUNY Press.
Royle, Nicholas (2003) The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Weber, Samuel (1973) ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’, MLN, 88 (6): 1102–33.
URANIANISM
The German jurist and homophile campaigner Karl Heinrich Ulrichs first coined the terms ‘Uranier’ and ‘Urning’ in the 1860s. Drawing on the discussion of Uranian love in Plato's Symposium, Ulrichs sought to offer an affirmative explanation of same-sex desire between men.
M
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 216-248
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Summary
MACHINE
By the end of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Industrial Revolution had turned the machine from a means of production into a sociocultural icon. To the modernist artists the machine offers itself as an IMPERSONAL model and an alternative to aesthetic convention, if also viewed with certain distrust. T. E. Hulme, for example, hailed the advent of ABSTRACT aesthetics, yet feared that machines would take too much credit for it. The machine is most explicitly embraced by the avant-garde, epitomised by FUTURISM in Italy and VORTICISM in England, as a radical commitment to the future opened by TECHNOLOGY. WAR did much to reinvest the perception of the machine with suspicion, turning its potential for impersonality into dehumanisation and death, both literal and cultural, but also political because complicit with the oppressive management of the human mode of production by the forces of consumer capitalism. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) is a poignant parody of such mechanical dehumanisation. It did not deter Ezra Pound, however, who continued to idealise machine parts in his pamphlet ‘Machine Art’ (1930) as the very natural poetic object that had eluded his IMAGIST project.
READING
Hulme, T. E. (1998) ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ [1914], in Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuiness. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Lewis, Wyndham et al. (1998) ‘Long Live the Vortex’ [1918], in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Olga Taxidou and Jane Goldman (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Pound, Ezra (1996) Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
MADELEINE
In Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) the first volume of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), the narrator recalls the experience of drinking a tisane to alleviate the winter cold, at the urging of his mother; with it is served a small scalloped cake or petite madeleine, untasted since childhood. Soaked in the tea, the taste of this morsel unlocks a fleeting sensation that is the involuntary MEMORY of his past in Combray and from that ‘madeleine’ Proust's epic of modernism proceeds. Involuntary memory is distinct from voluntary memory in that it arises unbidden and provides access to a different order of time in which the past can be recovered in the present.
9 - Bloom-Space of Theory: The Pleasure and the Bliss of Gerty MacDowell
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- By Maria-Daniella Dick, lecturer in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow
- Edited by Julie Taylor
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- Book:
- Modernism and Affect
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 17 May 2015, pp 167-184
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Summary
How to begin when, after all, there is no pure or somehow originary state for affect? (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1)
Pleasure of the text, text of pleasure: these expressions are ambiguous because French has no word that simultaneously covers pleasure (contentment) and bliss (rapture). Therefore, “pleasure” here … sometimes extends to bliss, sometimes is opposed to it. But I must accommodate myself to this ambiguity. (Barthes 1975: 19)
In an interview with Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, Lawrence Grossberg speaks of the need to define the ‘specificity’ of what affect has come to encompass, since ‘basically, it's become everything that is non-representational or non-semantic – that's what we now call affect’ (Grossberg 2010: 316). Grossberg accordingly defines affect on the basis of Raymond Williams's ‘structures of feeling’, which he understands to be
about the limits of signification, of representation, and (though I am loath to use the word) the kind of “excess” or “surplus” that is always there through discursive production that is not captured by notions of signification or representation … So, I think that the notion of a gap between what can be rendered meaningful or knowable and what is nevertheless livable is a more interesting place to start. And for me, this connects up in very interesting ways with notions of modernity and everyday life. (ibid.: 318)
As defined by Gregg and Seigworth, one of the aims of the ‘affective turn’ is to move away from the so-called linguistic turn, and it is arguably in that separation that it is constituted as the new in theory. I wish to examine the significance of that break for affect theory as a discourse and its relation to theory more broadly. While the claim that affect can bypass the semiotic is what gives affect theory its modernity as a discourse predicated upon a conscious break from structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics, I should like to interrogate its definition as a non-semiotic force postulated as the ‘livable’ exterior of meaning and the implications of that definition for a discourse that is ostensibly understood through its resistance to proper qualities.