Analysis Of J. Hillis Miller's Repetition And The Uncanny

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The "uncanny" is a loaded term. Despite its seemingly straightforward front, it has extended itself to a variety of disciplines over time, gradually evolving into a multifaceted concept through the work of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. Thus, regardless of the academic context at hand, the uncanny requires its handler to pay mind to the word 's implicit psychological and psychoanalytic history when attempting to use it as a key element in one 's argument. It is in the third chapter of J. Hillis Miller 's Fiction and Repetition that one can see an attempt to navigate this complex ground. The title of the aforementioned analysis of Wuthering Heights, "Repetition and the 'Uncanny, '" primes Miller 's audience for the introduction of a pre-existing term before they have even begun to assess the essay; however, upon further textual investigation, the uncanny is barely mentioned throughout the entirety of the chapter. In fact, out of the thirty-one pages present in the text, Freud is first mentioned a baffling twenty-eight pages in. At this point in his essay, Miller admits he is "alter[ing] Freud 's formulas a little," despite discussing a presupposed variation of the uncanny from the start of the text (Miller 69). While Miller certainly calls to aspects of Freud 's The Uncanny, such as the latter 's insistence that realism can aid in producing a sense of the uncanny within a literary framework, he ultimately tends to misuse the concept, if not wholly ignore it, bending

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