The Uncanny Mask and the Fiction Writer single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 The Uncanny Mask and the Fiction Writer
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'This paper explores the connection between the mask and fiction writing. Freud has theorised the identifications of writers and readers with the masks of literary personae, but my interest in this essay is with how the mask of a narrator or character can function uncannily to impede identification. I am also interested in research emerging from neuroscience, socobiology and robotics, the last of which has drawn attention to the ‘uncanny valley’, an affect generated by cybernetic beings that deny – by virtue of their mask-like faces – the neuronal mirror activity fundamental to human identity. Both Freudian and emerging scientific research provide the context for the question I ask here: how might we understand the affect generated by a fiction writer who uses the uncanny mask of a narrator or character to refuse opportunities for identification and to elicit, instead, an uncanny crisis in subjectivity within the reader? To answer this question, I employ a hybrid autoethnographic methodology that recognises the primacy of feeling when it comes to the experience of the uncanny and that acknowledges my own compromised position as a writer invested in such unfriendly or sadistic affects.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 18 no. 2 2021 21790927 2021 periodical issue

    'I am not asking if it is difficult. It can be. What I am asking is if it is a doctorate in the field of rocket science. Clearly, it is not. In fact, it should not be a doctorate in any other field than creative writing. Yet, over and over again, we find this simple fact misunderstood or misrepresented or misinterpreted. I admit I used to blame colleagues in English and Literary Studies for attempting to bend creative writing study (the methods, philosophies behind the degree, outcomes) to their disciplinary will. But I was wrong – English Literature Departments are not to blame, Literary Studies is not the culprit here. Nor is Cultural Studies, Film and Media Studies, Theatre Studies, Writing Studies, Composition Studies, or Biomedical Studies or Legal Studies, for that matter. If the Doctorate in Creative Writing might as well be a Doctorate in Rocket Science we have no one to blame but ourselves.' (Editorial introduction)

    2021
    pg. 136-148
Last amended 13 May 2021 14:21:14
136-148 The Uncanny Mask and the Fiction Writersmall AustLit logo New Writing
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