Consider at Least Two Theoretical Interpretations of the ‘Uncanny’ in Relation to the Wicker Man and/or Don’t Look Now.

458 Words2 Pages
Consider at least two theoretical interpretations of the ‘uncanny’ in relation to The Wicker Man and/or Don’t Look Now. By Matthew Woodward - December 2010 Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which deals with the nature of beauty, art and taste, and with creation and the appreciation of beauty (sensory or sensori-emotional values). “It [the uncanny] is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” – Freud. “Certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening” is deemed the ‘common-core’ which allows us to distinguish what we believe to be ‘uncanny’. Jentsch’s study of the ‘uncanny’ shows that people significantly differ in their sensitivity to what evokes the uncanny feeling. Freud describes that the uncanny is evoked by “a feeling that the person has long since experienced or heard of anything that has given him an uncanny impression”, yet for the person to experience the uncanny he must experience himself into the possibility of experiencing it. Freud claims that both the meaning which has been attached to the ‘uncanny’, and the people, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse the feeling of uncanniness are linked to the same result: that “the uncanny is the class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Freud suggests that something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny, whilst Jentsch claims the feeling of uncanniness can be related back to intellectual uncertainty which, in Freud’s terms, “would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in” – suggesting that the uncanny was also unfamiliar. Jentsch suggested in his studies that for a writer to produce uncanny effects in their novels, they must “leave the reader in uncertainty to whether a particular figure in the story is a
Open Document