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We speak freely of historical romances, tragedies and farces, of historical ironies and repetition, but the idea of a historical uncanny, located between the genres of the fantastic and the detective story, has never been systematically explored so far as I know. This paper is an attempt to do just that. I will analyze a range of key images and metaphors—including the metaphor of a “War on Terror” itself—that structure public discourse in the post-9-11 era, with special emphasis on the uncanny transitions between reality and fantasy, the literal and the metaphoric, the ghost and the double. The historians’ ethical task, of course, is to resist and prevent the occurrence of the uncanny in its most familiar form, repetition. The rhetoric of repetition (“those who ignore history…”) joins the Imaginary (the iconographic and literary uncanny), and the Ghost (“spirit of the age”).
This is not a Freudian reading so much as literary one, with all praise to Tzvetan Todorov for locating it precisely between the fantastic narrative and the detective story. I do not wish to make the uncanny into a fetish-concept; precisely the opposite. The collaboration between literary and historical modes of thought becomes especially strong in the case of the uncanny, because it is so obviously constitutive of historical discourse at the same time that it is disavowed. History resists the uncanny; literature analyzes it. Surely the two disciplines have something to learn from each other on this front.
William J. T. Mitchell
Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Since 2008 William J.T. Mitchell is one of the Honorary Members of the ZfL.
Hinweise zur Teilnahme:
Termin:
18.05.2011 20:00 - 22:00
Veranstaltungsort:
Hebbel am Ufer -- HAU 1
Stresemannstr. 29
10963 Berlin
10963 Berlin
Berlin
Deutschland
Zielgruppe:
Studierende, Wissenschaftler
E-Mail-Adresse:
Relevanz:
lokal
Sachgebiete:
Kulturwissenschaften, Politik, Sprache / Literatur
Arten:
Vortrag / Kolloquium / Vorlesung
Eintrag:
12.04.2011
Absender:
Sabine Zimmermann
Abteilung:
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZFL)
Veranstaltung ist kostenlos:
ja
Textsprache:
Englisch
URL dieser Veranstaltung: http://idw-online.de/de/event34957
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