The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (review)

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-345
Author(s):  
Juliet McMaster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Uncanny

scholarly journals Gotycyzm/gotycyzmy – rekwizyty i metamorfozy

2017 ◽  
pp. 325-338
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Izdebska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Uncanny

The article deals with phenomena of the Gothic the most often described as a set of often-linked elements rather than a fixed genre. The text presents a variety of cultural incarnations of the convention: from the eighteenth century novel by horror movies to subcultural style of Goths. This essay also examines the basic Gothic concepts, like the uncanny and the abject, which determine the worlds depicted in Gothic narratives, especially characters who remain in close connection with the space formed as a labyrinth. Finally, the article is an attempt to answer the question about the source of the expansion of the aesthetics of the Gothic in the contemporary culture.

Second Sight in Scotland

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-166
Author(s):  
Michael Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Universe

This chapter considers changing attitudes during the long eighteenth century to second sight — the uncanny ability of certain individuals to foresee the future — in Scotland. This was a topic which fascinated Boyle in the late seventeenth century. This chapter illustrates how his enquiries on the subject began a tradition of empirical study of the phenomenon which continued into the eighteenth century. But then a change came, and by about 1800 the possibility of second sight was increasingly rejected among English and Scottish intellectuals on the grounds that it was incompatible with the ‘principles’ by which the universe operated. In parallel with this, however, a separate tradition emerged in which second sight and related phenomena were deemed appropriate for imaginative interpretation by poets and others, which is significant in itself.

Flowers over the Abyss: A Musical Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Amanda Lalonde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ninth Symphony ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Definition Of

The term unheimlich (uncanny) comes into usage in German music criticism in the nineteenth century and is often used to describe instrumental music, particularly sections of works featuring the ombra topic. While the idea that instrumental music can be uncanny regardless of text or program is not novel, this work differs from most existing scholarship on the musical uncanny in that it presents a possible precursor to the twentieth-century psychoanalytic uncanny. Instead, it examines Schelling's definition of the uncanny in the larger context of his ideas in order to form a basis for theorizing a version of this aesthetic category that is active in the nineteenth-century critical discourse about music. In the early nineteenth century, music becomes uncanny because it discloses what should remain hidden from finite revelation. Critics understand passages of instrumental ombra music as uncanny moments when music calls attention to itself as the sensuous manifestation of the Absolute. They remark on these passages’ effacing of boundaries and sense of becoming, residues of eighteenth-century uses of the topic in operatic supernatural scenes and as part of a chaos-to-order narrative in symphonic music. The article concludes with the reception of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the finale of Schubert's Octet, D. 803, using critics’ comments as a basis for extrapolating, through new analyses, as to the features that might make the particular works remarkable as examples of music's uncanny power made manifest.

Outside Ravel's Tomb

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Abbate
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Tombeau De Couperin ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Musical Modernism

In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankélévitch remarked that music machines and animated objects are pervasive motifs in the composer's oeuvre. These motifs shaped Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), and are significant generally in musical modernism. To trace their historical and philosophical meanings, we begin with a peculiar visual icon: Rousseau's tomb in the Panthéon (1794), which symbolizes an Enlightenment sense of tombeau as "containing the dead" yet also "animated from within." This characterization, in an imaginative leap, could also be applied to a box that reproduces music: the musical automaton. Such automata were perfected in the eighteenth century, and musical performers were compared to them, suggesting the uncanny aspects of both; a full intellectual history of this phenomenon has yet to be written. But given this history, which assumed new forms by 1900, we understand more fully the meanings borne by symptoms of mechanism in Ravel's piano suite and his opera. They are modernist reflections on human subjectivity in music, its loss in mechanical reproduction, and the futility of seeking lost objects by breaking open a tomb.

The Deliberative Sublime: Edmund Burke on Disruptive Speech and Imaginative Judgment

2017 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROB GOODMAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Rhetorical Practice

Is there a case to be made for the value, amidst relatively settled institutions, of unsettling speech—speech characterized by excess, impropriety, and even the uncanny? Much of contemporary deliberative theory would answer in the negative. This article, however, proposes that we can derive a defense of the deliberative value of immoderate speech from an unlikely source: Edmund Burke's theory and practice of the rhetorical sublime. Burke's account of the sublime was developed in response to an eighteenth-century discourse of civility that anticipated the anti-rhetorical strand of contemporary deliberative theory. By reconstructing Burke's response, we can recover a forceful defense of rhetoric in the present. For Burke, the disruptive practice of sublime speech can provoke circumstantial judgment, overcoming deliberators’ aversions to judging. Drawing on Burke's rhetorical practice alongside his aesthetic and linguistic theory, this article upholds a central role in deliberation for rhetoric, even in its unruly and excessive aspects.

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