In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says this about the use of violence, “With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (113). As a fiction writer, one of the questions I struggle with is the justifiability of an overtly violent landscape. In my critical introduction, I will explore how the writers Christopher Coake, Monica Drake, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Benjamin Percy leverage violence through the symbolism of architectural and natural structures—e.g. buildings and caves—in order to reveal something essential about their characters and the larger world. I will also discuss how I strive to use architectural and natural structures in my own story collection to say something essential about characters navigating a landscape fraught with violence and loss.

The Gothic novel becomes a vogue in the mid-eighteenth century, and its conventions still influence works today that try to fully present horror. The Gothic novel is distinct in its mood, style, and settings. It has established a tradition of horror fiction in which sexuality, violence, death, and immorality are interwoven. These themes work with supernatural power and spectral settings that transmits a deathly atmosphere. Put in such a context, characters cannot but feel the horror produced by those settings and the medieval style; henceforth, they are always situated in the mood of darkness which causes the feelings of sublime. These themes, settings, and style help the Gothic novel to form its own Gothic conventions which still influence the production of horror fiction. The first chapter analyzes how the sublime and uncanny effects produced by the conventions of the Gothic work against the morality of the time. Matthew Lewis manipulates the spectral techniques brought by the sublime and uncanny to pierce through the regulation of morality. The sublime effects transform horror experienced in reading into pleasure and the spectrality in supernatural descriptions makes the morality seem less apparent. The supernatural phenomena divert the reader from attention to issues of morality. The second chapter is to investigate how a set of standards concerning sexuality becomes binding and imperative to men and women in The Monk. In Lewis¡¦s novel, womanhood is the incarnation of the sublime, its sublimity consisting of a force that compels male and female characters to obey regulations concerning sexuality. Thus, from the sublimity of womanhood, a sexual ideological develops in the novel, Staying pure and sacred in body and soul is not only binding to woman but also to man. The thirst for power on the part of the novel¡¦s villains is an attempt to violate and destroy the power of womanhood; the novel¡¦s heroes are trying to embody that power. The third and final chapter is to investigate how the gendered bodies determined the gendered identities with the assistance of Judith Butler¡¦s theory of the gendered matrix, which defines gender types and forms gender identity. Following their gendered identity, each character is citing the corresponding ideological sexual strand. Their activities actually ¡§cite¡¨ the gendered concept and perform the gender identity through their bodies. Even though the stereotyped characters seem flat, there is still a gray area in the novel where clear-cut gender¡¦s performativity is improbable. Thus, on occasion, Lewis undercuts the gender constructions that he seems to endorse, making the Gothic and all the effects it produces a smoke screen behind which he can occasionally go against the grain of the (sexual) morality of his time. This double-layer quality of The Monk¡¦s morality makes reading that novel an act of piercing through artistic forms and wondering if what lies underneath them represents indeed the novel¡¦s core meaning.

The following report describes the pre-production, production, and post-production stages of the short film UNCANNY VALLEY, a film about a person trying to digitally resurrect his deceased mother. After his mother passes away from cancer, Anish finds a place where he can input data in order to breathe life into expired things. UNCANNY VALLEY touches on the subject of the proliferation of personal data and how it might be used to reconstruct an incomplete portrait of a given period of time. This report recounts the experience of producing the film as well as insights into the writing process and the pre-production process. Supplemental materials include a final draft of the script and storyboards. / text

Much has been written about the effectiveness of speculative fiction, especially utopian works. In this thesis I will examine the source of fear in Margaret Artwood’s works The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake using Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” to illustrate the terror of doubles as they appear in the novels. The terror in The Handmaid’s Tale comes from the descriptions of distorted physical environments, while the horror in Oryx and Crake emanates from the familiar yet twisted animals and characters found inside the corporate compounds. Through the recognition of these doubles as uncanny, Atwood’s work moves readers to cognition and social action. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This study examines contemporary Hollywood by focusing on films made between 1990 and 2010. With chapters on the double, war trauma, the undead, and automata, I delineate evidence of the uncanny within individual films along with the underlying contradictions that symptomatically respond to the larger economic conditions and industrial practices that shape the contemporary period. Each of the four chapters also serve as an occasion to analyze theoretical and thematic concerns drawn from Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay on the uncanny. Throughout the project there is a strong effort to link Freud's initial account to subsequent theoretical developments with a particular emphasis on introducing the work of Jacques Derrida. The cumulative aim of these efforts is provide a critical foundation for analyzing the latent disorientation within the practices of contemporary Hollywood and capitalist society more generally.

In Uncanny Capitalism, I examine works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that incorporate literary elements typically associated with gothic fiction into their depictions of America's capitalist economy. In so doing, I trace a widespread tendency found throughout American literature to some of its earliest and most revealing manifestations, arguing that the gothic lent itself to such uses because eighteenth-century thinkers had long relied upon the fictional mode to represent the divergence between their own commercial societies and the feudal economies of the past. In the course of its development, capitalism occasionally displayed characteristics that linked it with the gothic practices it had supposedly left behind. When it did, my chosen writers used the gothic to represent the convergence between America's commercial economy and its putative other.Chapter one examines the dichotomy that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur establishes between Europe and America in Letters from an American Farmer that is founded upon two opposing forms of power: an oppressive European one and another that is American and productive. This opposition collapses in the letter devoted to Charles Town where Europe's feudal institutions have made an uncanny reappearance on American soil. Chapter two reads the self-incriminating narrators of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of murder and confession as grotesque examples of the types of coercion upon which the nation's emerging market economy depended in the nineteenth-century. Chapter three examines Frederick Douglass' alternation between the formal techniques of the realist and gothic novels in his 1845 Narrative, and argues that Douglass uses the figure of the gothic monster to apprehend the way in which slavery violates the natural order by commodifying human beings and placing them on a par with the brute creation. I conclude the dissertation with an analysis of the uncanny episodes in The Blithedale Romance that Nathaniel Hawthorne uses to reveal the long reach of the commodity form and the futility of any efforts at escaping the deleterious effects of the market revolution via a Transcendentalist retreat into nature.

Horror films act as a barometer for society's tensions and anxieties, and the early years of the twenty-first century have seen a notable increase in such movies, the zombie narrative in particular. This "Zombie Renaissance" demonstrates increased dread concerning violent death--via terrorist attacks or contagious infection--and establishes the currency of a critical investigation into this oft-maligned subgenre. The zombie narrative has particular value to American cultural studies as the creature was born on the shores of the New World, rather than being co-opted from the Old, and it functions as a symbolic reminder of the atrocities of colonialism and slavery. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Haitian folklore, the voodoo-based zombie films of the 1930s and '40s do crucial cultural work in their own right, revealing deep-seated racist attitudes and imperialist paranoia, but the zombie invasion narrative established by George A. Romero has even greater singularity. Having no established literary analogue, Romero borrowed instead from voodoo mythology, vampire tales, and science fiction invasion narratives to develop a new tradition with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. His conception of a contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde uniquely manifests modern apprehensions about the horrors of Vietnam, the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, and, in the more recent films, the problems of excessive consumerism and the anxieties of both the Cold War and the current War on Terror. Essentially, zombies work as powerful metaphors for modern-day society and the prevailing cultural unease surrounding violent death and the loss of autonomous subjectivity, and, as recent production proves, the subgenre will continue to serve the viewing public as it grows, mutates, and evolves.

The uncanny is a feeling that is closely related to fear and fright but is not quite the same. It is a feeling of unsettling discomfort – that there is something that one does not understand. This project explores the aesthetic of the uncanny through tailoring. By using draping and the inherent body-altering techniques within tailoring this project shows alternative expression within tailoring by distortion of body and garment.

Thesis advisor: Vanessa Rumble / The aims of my dissertation are 1) to explicate what I take to be the philosophical foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis with the aid of Schelling’s contributions to the development of the unconscious and the nature of human freedom and 2) to make use of certain fundamental discoveries of psychoanalysis in order to reinterpret Schelling’s dynamic and developmental vision of reality. My claim is that Schelling’s philosophy not only offers an important historical moment in the development of the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious, but also gives us a vision of human development—and indeed the development of Being as such—that is grounded in the unconscious and the activity of the drives. Where Freud is often viewed as a determinist, through a closer examination of the connections Schelling makes between the unconscious ground of existence and human freedom we can begin to open up the space for a more complex Freudian subjectivity. Furthermore, the advances Freud makes in terms of the structure of the unconscious, his work on the altered temporality (most notably Nachträglichkeit, or “afterwards-ness”) of trauma and repression, also serve to bring some of Schelling’s most abstract and speculative work to both a more practical and philosophically relevant level. In the work of both Schelling and Freud, the relationship between the human subject and the reality such a subject “confronts” is radically transformed. In Schelling, we find that the developmental phases of Being, of the Absolute and of Nature are also manifested in the structure of human becoming; that is, the catastrophic divide between subjective experience and objective reality is bridged by reinterpreting both as dynamic processes. Although Freud himself often has recourse to a more static view of “objective” reality, his work also speaks to a deep and disturbing revision of such a view. Indeed, Freud’s continued questioning of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, between the internal and the external, suggest that the irreducible otherness of the unconscious extends beyond the individual. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This dissertation identifies and explores a genre of performance I term the “theatrical uncanny.” Intermingling aesthetics and psychology, the uncanny is the realm of “intellectual uncertainty” (for Ernst Jentsch) and “the familiar made strange” (for Sigmund Freud); it is an obscure but palpable disruption of our expectations. The genre of the uncanny has received a great deal of scholarly attention in both film and literature, but has, by contrast, been minimally explored in performance. This neglect is particularly striking considering theatre itself can be viewed as inherently uncanny. The repetitions and representations of performance, its interdependence of the real and the imaginary, imply a kind of ever-present déjà vu. The very pervasiveness of this quality can in fact render it insensible. The genre of uncanny performance is therefore a valuable designation for works that actively elicit this psycho-emotional response. The productions I study are remarkable for their ability to capitalize on theatre’s uncanny potential. I demonstrate that this category of performance is not limited to any particular style or status, locating the effect as potently in popular entertainments (such as the junk opera Shockheaded Peter and punchdrunk’s Sleep No More) as in more esoteric or avant-garde work (like that of artists such as the Quay Brothers and Tadeusz Kantor). Drawing on a variety of methods – including phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science – I engage with these performances as sensual experience. Through subjective impression and extensive description, I gradually elucidate the scenographic parameters of the theatrical uncanny. The productions that achieve this effect, while greatly disparate in nature, share certain approaches and techniques in common. They position the spectator (physically, emotionally, perceptually) in an unstable relationship to the objects and bodies of the performance, creating the sensation that the inanimate actually possesses its own unique vitality. Uncanny performance interweaves elements of object theatre, memory theatre, and intermediality, but cannot be encompassed by any of these terms in isolation. These performances question our basic qualifications for declaring something ‘live,’ as the term is used both theoretically and colloquially. They ask what it would mean for a memory to behave as an object, or for an object to have memories. This study is both a critique of how the uncanny works on stage and an attempt to rethink the concept of the uncanny through theatre practice. I argue that the uncanny is best understood as an embodied experience, a feeling mediated through and registered within our flesh. It results from unsettling interactions between our bodies and the matter and space around us. The concrete and present spatial relationships of theatre are ideal for exploring these tensions. Through the materiality of theatre, I offer evidence that the uncanny response, rather than being a marginal or naïve interpretation of the world (as it is sometimes portrayed), is actually a fundamental and profoundly productive state of mind.