Premium
Beyond the uncanny: Shirley Jackson’s poetics of alienation
Author(s) -
Angeloch Dominic
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/oli.12337
Subject(s) - uncanny , poetics , narrative , depiction , alienation , context (archaeology) , psychoanalysis , psyche , literature , subject (documents) , reading (process) , philosophy , aesthetics , art , history , psychology , linguistics , poetry , archaeology , library science , political science , computer science , law
Shirley Jackson is one of the most important authors of the uncanny of the twentieth century. Forgotten after her death in 1965, she is currently being rediscovered. This paper attributes her mastery to the depiction and evocation of extreme mental states, especially alienation and estrangement from oneself. In the debate on the uncanny dominated by Freud’s essay of the same name, these phenomena, situated at the edges of the uncanny, are usually left out. A reading of Freud’s short text “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis” (1936), which has so far gone unnoticed in this context, makes it possible to introduce the concepts of “depersonalization” and “derealization” into the conceptual constellation of the uncanny. Against this background, the paper undertakes a close reading of Jackson’s story “The Tooth” (1948). Jackson’s narrative techniques here, as in her later works, are based on a poetics of transgression. The actual subject of the narrative is told by shaping it subliminally: instead of discursively treating the depths of the human psyche, the narrative evokes them directly in its readers. This is the reason why Jackson’s literature is able to convey (self‐)alienation and related phenomena such as dreams and hallucinations so vividly.