A ghost in his supposedly safe old house’: Uncanny Homes in American Fiction

Lecturer

Laura Barrett, Armstrong State University

Files

Media Type

Article

Date of Lecture

1-30-2014

Keywords

Armstrong State University, A Moveable Feast, The Flannery O'Connor House

Description of Lecture

When Henry James returned to his native land after a nearly thirty-year absence, he remarked that he felt dispossessed and alienated, as if there were “a ghost in his supposedly safe old house.” What James describes is a sense of the uncanny, defined by Freud as the familiar made strange. Building intersections between theory and art, Barrett will discuss how turn-of-the-century American literature—rife with haunted houses and eerie doubles—reveals an uncanny moment in American history, one in which concepts of home and self were in flux.

Comments

The Flannery O’Connor House

207 East Charlton Street

Laura Barrett, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts

Recommended Citation

Barrett, Laura, "A ghost in his supposedly safe old house’: Uncanny Homes in American Fiction" (2014). A Moveable Feast (2013-2017). 14.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/armstrong-moveable-feast/14

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.