CONFERENCE: Uncanny Day
Stephen Clark
The Uncanny Day
Friday 5 March 2004, 10.00am-4.30pm
Tate Liverpool
Conference Description:
This conference brings together leading scholars and critics to explore the
phenomenon, notion and sensation of The Uncanny, Freud’s Unheimliche, its
sources, resources, its past and present significance as well as its threats
and thrills when surfacing in the arts, whether visual, literary, poetic and
sonorous. How are we affected, or consumed, by the Uncanny today, in everyday
life as well as through the arts?
An informal study day to complement the exhibition The Uncanny by Mike Kelly in
collaboration with the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities of the University of Cambridge, and Tate Liverpool.
The day includes talks and discussion as well as a guided tour of the exhibition
The Uncanny.
Programme:
9.00-10.00 Registration
10.00-10.15 Welcome by Beate PERREY and Introduction by Christoph GRUNENBERG
10.15-10.45 Malcolm BOWIE (Cambridge): ‘Revisiting Freud's Unheimliche: have we
been looking for the Uncanny in the right places?'
10.45-11.15 Beate PERREY (Paris/Liverpool): ‘Sounds of the Uncanny’
11.15-11.45 Tea/Coffee
11.45-12.15 Penny FLORENCE (London): 'Purgatory, the Uncanny and Why Women need
not Beware Women'
12.15-1.00 Tour of Exhibition
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-2.30 Alyce MAHON (Cambridge): ‘Uncanny Boundaries in the International
Surrealist Exhibition, 1938’
2.30-3.00 Stephen CLARK (Liverpool): ‘Moments of Truth?’
3.00-3.30 Tea/Coffee
3.30-4.00 Gillian BEER (Cambridge): 'Recognising What's Uncanny'
4.00-4.30 Closing Discussion
THE SPEAKERS:
Malcolm BOWIE (Cambridge): ‘Revisiting Freud's Unheimliche: have we been looking
for the Uncanny in the right places?'
In this talk, Bowie will be rereading Freud's celebrated paper of 1919 and
asking whether his concept of Das Unheimliche is not overdue for release from
the straitjacket in which much psychoanalytic criticism has confined it. Bowie
will suggest a much wider and stranger range of applications for this
semi-technical term.
Malcolm Bowie, previously Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and Fellow
of All Souls College in the University of Oxford, is now Master of Christ's
College Cambridge.
Beate PERREY (Paris/Liverpool): ‘Sounds of the Uncanny’
What does the uncanny sound like? And what is it good for? Robert Schumann’s
compositional investment in masques, doubles and revenants, mobilized by a
taste for secrets and a curiosity for ever-changing alternatives shows that the
essential pleasures to be gained from the uncanny lies in the creation of
movement itself — the very stuff of which music is made.
Beate Perrey is currently Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris and Senior Lecturer in Critical Musicology at the University of
Liverpool.
Penny Florence (London): 'Purgatory, the Uncanny and Why Women need not Beware
Women'
A fearless exploration between real and imaginary, in which the (im)possibility
of embodiment in the (S)symbolic fails to manifest.
Penny Florence works in cultural analysis and contemporary art. She is Head of
Research Programmes at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College
London.
Dr Alyce MAHON (Cambridge): ‘Uncanny Boundaries in the International Surrealist
Exhibition, 1938’
This paper will address the role of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition
in the history of the Surrealist movement, presenting it as a collective
enterprise which challenged the boundaries of the viewing experience and
attempted to liberate sexual, social and political inhibitions, through a
radically new approach to the exhibition space. I will argue that the
Surrealists' aim to recover "psychic force" and erotic desire in the exhibition
was founded upon a radical and subversive celebration of the feminine as a
locus for the “uncanny”.
Alyce Mahon is University Lecturer in Modern Art and a Fellow of Trinity College
at the University of Cambridge.
Stephen CLARK (Liverpool): ‘Moments of Truth?’
Clark will explore the uncanny via a selection of Plotinian quotes, such as:
"When we look outside that on which we depend we do not know that we are one,
like faces which are many on the outside but have one head inside. But if
someone is able to turn around, either by himself or having the good luck to
have his hair pulled by Athena herself, he will see God and himself and the
all.”
Stephen Clark specializes in Greek Philosophical Thought. He is Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.
Gillian BEER (Cambridge): 'Recognising What's Uncanny'
How do we distinguish the uncanny from the ordinary, especially in fiction,
where anything is possible because everything is absent? Taking the theme of
return in three examples, Hardy's poem 'The Voice', Virginia Woolf 'To the
Lighthouse' and W. G. Sebald 'Austerlitz' I explore the power of recognition
and the rituals of memory in uncanny encounter. How is the reader implicated in
such scenes?
Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of
Cambridge.
Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html.
Prolonged discussions should be moved to chora: enrol via
http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/chora.html.
Other philosophical resources on the Web can be found at http://www.liv.ac.uk/Philosophy/philos.html