Call for Articles – ‘Uncanny Perspectives: Texts, Images, Experiences’

IDEA – Interdisciplinary Discourses, Education and Analysis launches a call for articles for its new issue ‘Uncanny Perspectives: Texts, Images, Experiences’.

 The twentieth-century literature and culture tended to explore and to celebrate subjectivity. But this tendency did not mean the turn to the self, but beyond the self, to a dimension of fragmentation of experience, which questions, often in radical ways, our ordinary notions of identity and belonging.

In his attempts to define the uncanny, Sigmund Freud asserted that it is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror. It may be something domestic but at the same time strange, bizarre, unfriendly, dangerous, something that sets the sense of insecurity within the four walls of one’s house: “Persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which are known and long familiar arouse in us the feeling of danger, fear and even horror. Everyday objects may suddenly lose their familiar side, and become messengers” (Freud).

The uncanny suggests an unsettling of any feeling of comfort and reassurance in one’s home, but also in oneself, questioning both our rational boundaries and our inner life. Architecture can take the place of psychology. At the same time, archaeology conveys the problematic relation between multiple stratifications and levels, representing the intricacy of humans’ inner life. The perturbed relationship between the characters and their familiar world, and the troubled sense of home and self-certainty, are results of a traumatic experience of loss. The uncanny also allows to explore the reasons and the roots of traumatic loss related to historical events, to difficult memories of the past, to the crisis of experience in the context of modernity.

In the new literary and artistic discourse authors tend to depict the new human being as psychologically deep and multi-layered, fragmentary, in crisis, taken between random thoughts, the search for unity and the dimension of a dream-world. Style can rely on discontinuities, fragments, breaks, ellipses and disrupted linearity of the narration. It serves to convey the idea of the fractured character of modern time and fragmentariness and allusiveness of subconscious thought. As a form of externalization of consciousness, the uncanny becomes a meta-concept for modernity with its disintegration of time, space and self.

This issue seeks to explore the representations of the uncanny in language, literature and culture. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

• The uncanny in literature: novel, short story, poetry, other literary forms
• Uncanny geographies
• Uncanny technologies
• The uncanny and visual tropes: film, photography, video, experimental cinema
• The uncanny and postcolonialism
• History, memory and the uncanny

We invite proposals from different fields such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, film studies, literature, linguistics, etc.

Interested authors are required to submit an abstract of the proposed work with a title and a maximum of 5 keywords (max. 300 words for the abstract) and a short biographical note (max. 250 words).

Authors having received notification of acceptance will be invited to submit their original and previously unpublished research articles. The articles length should be between 5000 and 7000 words.

Authors are required to send abstracts and biographical notes to the following address: gabriele.biotti@lcir.co.uk

Important Dates

Abstracts and biographical notes submission deadline: 10 December 2022.

Notification of acceptance / rejection of abstracts: 15 January 2023.

Full texts submission deadline: 15 March 2023.

Communication of the selection / Notification of articles approval / Notification of minor or major revisions necessary: 15 May 2022.