Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny

Abstract

Is there a specifically modern uncanny? Freud’s famous essay relates the uncanny to the timeless processes of the unconscious, and even refers back to archaic modes of thought — animism, magical powers of consciousness, the return of the dead, the existence of doubles. 2 But while I would never claim that the uncanny is exclusively a modern phenomenon, I would certainly claim there is a modern uncanny. Much of what we think of as uncanny entails the emergence of a modern world: the struggle that an enlightened scientific worldview undertook with what it understood as superstition and illusion. The uncanny can arise when certain beliefs, taken for granted in traditional cultures, become unsettling and strange (yet, as Freud indicates, also hauntingly familiar) to modern experience. Likewise radical new technologies on first appearance can seem somehow magical and uncanny, recalling the wish fulfillments that magical thought projected into fairy tales and rituals of magic.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.