Catty reviewer gets in a flap
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'Third rate schlock-horror writer'? No way. Third rate is far too generous. If you check out Dog in a Flat Cap's other reviews you'll see he/she's heavily into video games and the Tarot, so I hope Nicholas Royle will not take his/her remarks too much to heart. I am Nicholas Royle, but I am not the author of the book under discussion. I read The Uncanny with enormous enjoyment and enthusiasm -- and not just the chapter about me (& Nick).
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something which should have remained hidden
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This book contains very little of use apart from its bibliography. It refers to a panoply of texts vital for an understanding of scholarship on the Uncanny (e.g. Freud, Cixous, Jane Todd, Sarah Kofman), but in and of itself really has nothing of note to add. Apart from the intellectual paucity of its original material some of this book actually makes me cringe. For example, Royle devotes an entire chapter to 'The Double', which becomes an excuse for him to share his narcissistic and protracted contemplations on the fact that a third rate schlock-horror writer shares his name, and so we are treated to page-sized photos of the unbeguiling doppelgangers. And when ruminating on the relation of death to the Uncanny, Royle feels inspired to set the chapter out in bullet points, leading him to pose the eternal riddle: 'Who's shooting whom?' at which point I wished I had a gun. I'm not clear at whom this book is aimed - as a student textbook it's very limited and as a theoretical exercise it's downright vapid. It drips with an unattractive mire of ego and RAE necessity and, in case you hadn't gathered, I would certainly not advise anyone to buy it. Its bibliography, however, is a treasure trove, and so check it out of a library if you're interested in the Uncanny. The ideas raised in the book about Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Death, Female Spectrality - these are all lifted from other writers (see Sarah Kofman in 'Freud and Fiction', Cixous on Freud's Unheimliche), and not enhanced in any way. And the writing is simply not half as good as it thinks it is.
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An Uncanny Wit
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Being familiar with the haughty writings of Freud is a definite bonus, even more so with those glistening moments of seeming self-doubt and evasiveness that punctuate his work. It is fun once in a while to take a respected writer like Freud at his word, to really listen to what he is saying, and how he is saying it. The result is quite astonishing, disturbing, unstable, and more often that not, hilarious. Royle plucks out Sigmund's eyes in this work, and makes them watch him watching them. It is, by far and away and without the least shadow of a doubt, the funniest spectacle I have witnessed in many a long year. Royle's writing plays with the uncanny, rotating it to let us see all the grotesque and ludicrous faces it can present, buried alive, doppelgangers, psuedonyms, moles, hamlets, cannibals, the strange and spectral idea of the female. I am not a fan of lterary criticism and find most of it tiresome. In the end, I have admit that for giving me genuine belly-laughs at the pomp and seriousness of Sigmund Freud, in a magically burlesque style, this book is one of my current favorites. And yet its more serious side has had an effect on me too, and I sometimes find myself slipping into the same sort of playful, delimited style of writing that Royle has perfected. Uncanny.
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defining the undefinable
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Royle's latest work explores the mysterious, the unknown, the unimaginable. The term "uncanny" is perhaps one of the most difficult to define as it ties up so many aspects of our lives, yet Royle explores the many meanings whilst studying our fears of being buried alive, animism, silence, telepathy and perhaps the most unknown factor of life - death. His witty and thought provoking approach provides the ideal companion to anyone interested in trying to explain that sense of deja vu or haunting they experience in their lives, in the books they read, in the films they watch, in the conversations they have, in the odd things that hear....
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