Introduction

Abstract

<p align="left"> </p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Though first explored by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny", it is through Freud’s acclaimed study of 1919 that the notion of the uncanny has entered into contemporary critical debate. From the 1960s onwards, the uncanny has become an increasingly protean and floating concept reflecting the various tensions within postmodern conceptions of temporality and subjectivity. Structurally close to other theories of "defamiliarisation" articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (for example the Marxist notions of "alienation" and "commodity fetishism", the Russian formalists’ definition of </span><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times New Roman; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times New Roman; font-size: small;">ostranenie</span></span></em><span style="font-size: small;">, Heidegger’s </span><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times New Roman; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times New Roman; font-size: small;">Unheimlichkeit</span></span></em><span style="font-size: small;">, Brecht’s "A-effect"), the uncanny has reverberated widely in twentieth-century debate, from psychoanalysis (Lacan) to deconstruction (Derrida, Royle), from literary theory (Todorov, Cixous, Kristeva) to the philosophy of history (Certeau), and ultimately to the theory of architecture (Vidler). </span></p>