An Illustrated Lecture with Romany Reagan, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London

Date: Tuesday, November 4th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )
Location: 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn, NY

How can something be at once repulsive and alluring? Familiar, yet disturbing? Frightening, yet strangely beautiful? The threshold between these feelings suspends us in a liminality that has been termed ‘the uncanny’. Under this term fall an entire franken-family of concepts: the ‘death drive’, doppelgängers, ghosts and the spirit world, deja vu, allegory in literature, cemeteries, oral storytelling, ruins, the unconscious mind in psychoanalysis — and practically everything under the heading of ‘gothic’. In fact, the only consistent definition of the uncanny offered by theorists is its elusiveness. If it can be catalogued and defined — then it is no longer uncanny.

In this lexicological pilgrimage through the swamps of uncertainty, this talk will unpick the origins of this (relatively) new philosophical school of the uncanny. In an endeavour to cut a coherent path, this exploration of the uncanny will be through the lens of Charles Dickens’ Night Walks. Using this text and walking practice to signpost, this talk will analyse the observations and theories of Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, Nicholas Royle and Dylan Trigg.

Romany Reagan is a third-year PhD candidate in the department of drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her practice explores theories of anachronistic space, grief symbolisation and site-based performance through the medium of audio walks in Abney Park Cemetery. Areas of research encompass theatre archaeology, heterotopias, liminal spaces, human geography, the uncanny and the Victorian ‘cult of the dead’.

Image: Phuoc Quan, ” London”.