This class will introduce students to links between psychoanalysis, literature and film by tackling one major theme in Freud’s essays on the arts and literature: the concept of the Uncanny. We will then follow its more recent developments in Horror stories and Horror films. Studying a number of films and literary works, we will test, verify or question psychoanalytical concepts such as the Uncanny, the Thing, Abjection, Enjoyment and Fantasy. Why do we enjoy being startled or afraid when watching horror movies? What is unsettling but also endlessly fascinating and captivating in Gothic tales of madness and haunting? Why do we imagine that the dead might return? A psychoanalytic approach to this paradoxical enjoyment of fear in literary works and films provides original and dynamic methods of interpretation. As theoretical material, we will use three main texts: Freud’s collection of essays The Uncanny, Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry, and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror.
Courses > 2016 Fall
Electives
401 | LEC | Jean-Michel Rabaté | TR 9-10:30am | BENN 419
Electives
CINE 112 - FROM THE UNCANNY TO THE HORROR: LITERATURE, FILM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
ENGL 102 | COML 245401 | LEC | Jean-Michel Rabaté | TR 9-10:30am | BENN 419