ENG 510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis, Abjection
Document Summary
Gothic horror: the uncanny, the abject, and the grotesque. Doubles have always been figures of fear and anxiety because it takes away uniqueness. Fear can be introduced through a variety of ways that break reality: ghosts, giant things, monsters, exceptional storms, etc. The uncanny locates fear in the overly familiar. That which troubles us profoundly without any apparent explanation; the familiar rendered unfamiliar. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening to what arouses dread and horror. The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. The uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. We are creeped out by the uncanny because it brings forward something we used to know and repressed, yet is coming back to life to trouble us.
