The Uncanniness of Form

Abstract

Abstract This article is concerned with Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Amorina from 1839 and aims to exemplify how its formal organization relates to the Freudian uncanny. The convergence of the formal and the uncanny is explored in relation to the formalist concept of defamiliarization. I argue that the defamiliarizing potential of form can bring about the convergence of the strange and the familiar that Sigmund Freud identified with the uncanny. This potential overlap of the formal and the uncanny is also shown to be present in the tradition of Romantic irony, to which Amorina has frequently been related. The reading of Almqvist’s text is mainly centred on two of its most prominent aspects: its fictitious “publisher’s preface” and its continual shifts between a dramatic and a narrative form. In both cases the text is shown to stage great contrasts of form, genre and style, which disrupt the reader’s interpretive activity, placing them in an uncanny position of ambivalence and disorientation.

Keywords

• Gothic
• The Uncanny
• Formalism
• Romanticism
• Irony
• gotik