Uncanny Encounters Format: Paperback

Zilcosky, John

ISBN 10: 0810132095 / ISBN 13: 9780810132092

Published by University of Chicago press, 2016

About this Item

Brand New.

Seller Inventory # 9780810132092

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Uncanny Encounters Format: Paperback
• Publisher: University of Chicago press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810132095
• ISBN 13: 9780810132092
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award
Recipient, 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship

Around 1900, when the last blank spaces on their maps were filled, Europeans traveled to far-flung places hoping to find the spectacularly foreign. They discovered instead what Freud called, several years later, the uncannily familiar: disturbing reflections of themselves—either actual Europeans or Westernized natives. This experience was most extreme for German travelers, who arrived in the contact zones late, on the heels of other European colonialists, and it resulted not in understanding or tolerance but in an increased propensity for violence and destruction. The quest for a “virginal,” exotic existence proved to be ruined at its source, mirroring back to the travelers demonic parodies of their own worst aspects. In this strikingly original book, John Zilcosky demonstrates how these popular “uncanny” encounters influenced Freud’s—and the literary modernists’—use of the term, and how these encounters remain at the heart of our cross-cultural anxieties today.

About the Author

JOHN ZILCOSKY is a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. His previous publications include Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (2003), winner of the MLA’s 2004 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, and Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (2008).