Overview

Around 1900, when the last blank spaces on their maps were filled, Europeans traveled to far-flung places hoping to find traces of 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 crosscultural anxieties today.

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9780810132108

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Reviews

<i>Uncanny Encounters</i> is a wonderfully authoritative book, filled with superb readings of travel books rarely discussed or known, combined with original analyses of more canonical authors like Hesse, Mann, Musil, and von Hofmannstahl. --Jean-Michel Rabate, author of <i>Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature</i> and <i>Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction</i>

John Zilcosky s Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity argues that in the works of early twentieth-century German literature, modernist and popular, there are uncanny encounters in which Europeans find not an Orientalized or otherwise reified Other but instead, shockingly, versions of themselves, either actual Europeans or Europeanized natives. The result is not, however, understanding or tolerance, but rather an increased propensity for violence and destruction, as the quest for an exoticized existence, innocent, traditional, and sacred, is shown to be already ruined at the source, reflecting back at them the demonic parodies of their own worst aspects. This is an original and striking book. Daniel O'Hara, author of Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America

Author Information

John Zilcosky is a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. 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).

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