When Sigmund Freud wrote his essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”) in 1919—a work that remains highly regarded to this day—he used the term to describe an affective attitude that combines contradictory connotations, thereby making the concept a compelling indicator of the sensing of unease that characterized the transition from the 19th to the 20th century far more strongly than is generally recognized. And that despite the widespread belief in progress that accompanied the integration of industrialization into everyday life. This attitude is reflected in a wide variety of literary texts, although this atmosphere of fear and dread is by no means a defining characteristic of the turn of that century (think, for example, of the much older genre of the English Gothic novel or the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe). However, it is striking how certain topoi recur across languages and cultures during this period, not only tracing horror, but sometimes focusing it as a main subject. And it is equally significant that in a series of fantastic narratives, the starting point for such considerations is the heterotopos of the ship.
In her talk, Juliane Tauchnitz will discuss its movement as an activating motif that in turn sets the stories’ characters in motion (both internally and externally). She focusses primarily on texts by Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán and French author Guy de Maupassant, exploring the extent to which this theme of angst, with all its ‘uncanny’ implications, is linked to social upheaval in these texts. The central question will be whether the texts just describe fear in the face of a changing time, or whether this confrontation of the subject with eerie phenomena already reveals the outline of social ‘development’ (in a modern sense).