Keeping Track
I'm finally getting around to reading Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and am finding it compelling. Crudely summarized, it proposes to find the traces of the ones whose existence has been vanished by majority culture, traces she calls hauntings. She points specifically to those who have been erased from the historical record because of their skin color, class, and/or sex - as I pick my way through the first chapter, I found myself thinking of the handicapped as well (web pages that the blind can’t navigate, public buildings without accessible entrances, both a flat and unapologetic erasure).
Gordon references Freud’s “The Uncanny” at the beginning of her second chapter, and since I never got around to reading that either (and I can hardly read any MORE slowly than I already do these days) I’ve detoured to read the Freud essay.
As my better-read friends already know well, Freud begins by examining the curious meanings of the word “uncanny” (unheimlich), which is the opposite of heimlich, meaning familiar and comfortably home-like...except heimlich also means hidden and secretive (because it happens in the home?), until at the edges of usage (and apparently not that far out, either) the familiar comes to mean uncanny, as well.
And then to illustrate his point, Freud reads Hoffman's “The Sandman,” (1817; Gaslight has an English translation here) which I have never read either. So, detours within detours. And yes, what a bizarre and creepy tale. And I agree with Freud, the real creepiness isn't the automaton (uncanny valley and all) but the stolen eyes and the suggested doubling of the father.
Right, so back to Freud, who in further search of the effect of the uncanny as observed in literature, NEXT references Hoffman’s “The Devil’s Elixir,” a novel. You can see where this is going.
I downloaded it from the Gutenberg Project, and I'm now hip-deep in a nineteenth century translation of a full-blown gothic, monasteries and castles and ecstatic religious trances and really, I should have read this all a long time ago! But when I finally emerge with the mists of the convents trailing from the edges of my vision, remember, Martha, this is so you can read “The Uncanny.”
Um, so you can read Chapter 2 of Avery Gordon's book.
This entry was originally posted at http://saffronhouse.dreamwidth.org/132255.html, but you can comment anywhere you like.
Gordon references Freud’s “The Uncanny” at the beginning of her second chapter, and since I never got around to reading that either (and I can hardly read any MORE slowly than I already do these days) I’ve detoured to read the Freud essay.
As my better-read friends already know well, Freud begins by examining the curious meanings of the word “uncanny” (unheimlich), which is the opposite of heimlich, meaning familiar and comfortably home-like...except heimlich also means hidden and secretive (because it happens in the home?), until at the edges of usage (and apparently not that far out, either) the familiar comes to mean uncanny, as well.
And then to illustrate his point, Freud reads Hoffman's “The Sandman,” (1817; Gaslight has an English translation here) which I have never read either. So, detours within detours. And yes, what a bizarre and creepy tale. And I agree with Freud, the real creepiness isn't the automaton (uncanny valley and all) but the stolen eyes and the suggested doubling of the father.
Right, so back to Freud, who in further search of the effect of the uncanny as observed in literature, NEXT references Hoffman’s “The Devil’s Elixir,” a novel. You can see where this is going.
I downloaded it from the Gutenberg Project, and I'm now hip-deep in a nineteenth century translation of a full-blown gothic, monasteries and castles and ecstatic religious trances and really, I should have read this all a long time ago! But when I finally emerge with the mists of the convents trailing from the edges of my vision, remember, Martha, this is so you can read “The Uncanny.”
Um, so you can read Chapter 2 of Avery Gordon's book.
This entry was originally posted at http://saffronhouse.dreamwidth.org/132255.html, but you can comment anywhere you like.