In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud theorized the psychological implications of those aesthetic effects which disturb us without us quite knowing why.  While, according to Freud, the uncanny or das unheimlich evokes a peculiar form of affect within “the field of the frightening” (123), it is a type of fear distinct from that produced by horror and terror.  The uncanny, he argues, registers the traumatic return of “what was once known and had long been familiar” (124), but which had been repressed.  Explorations of the uncanny have linked the affect to repetition and the death drive (Royle 84), surrealism (97), uncertainty (Jentsch 7), and “a certainty that goes beyond any certainty that science can provide” (Dolar 22).  

What, if any, value does the concept of the uncanny have for scholars today?  Is the uncanny, as some have suggested, a distinctly modern phenomenon associated with Enlightenment conceptions of the self?   If the uncanny still holds critical value, what, in particular, does it allow us to think about in ways that other aesthetic/moral conceptual frameworks—the sublime, the terrifying, the beautiful, the grotesque—do not? All critical approaches are welcome in this in person panel.  Please send a brief C.V. and 250-word abstract to sean.kelly@wilkes.edu