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J. Hillis Miller's Repetition And The Uncanny?

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The "uncanny" is a loaded term. Despite its seemingly straightforward front, it has extended itself to a variety of disciplines over time, gradually evolving into a multifaceted concept through the work of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. Thus, regardless of the academic context at hand, the uncanny requires its handler to pay mind to the word's implicit psychological and psychoanalytic history when attempting to use it as a key element in one's argument. It is in the third chapter of J. Hillis Miller's Fiction and Repetition that one can see an attempt to navigate this complex ground. The title of the aforementioned analysis of Wuthering Heights, "Repetition and the 'Uncanny,'" primes Miller's audience for the introduction of a pre-existing …show more content…

At this point in his essay, Miller admits he is "alter[ing] Freud's formulas a little," despite discussing a presupposed variation of the uncanny from the start of the text (Miller 69). While Miller certainly calls to aspects of Freud's The Uncanny, such as the latter's insistence that realism can aid in producing a sense of the uncanny within a literary framework, he ultimately tends to misuse the concept, if not wholly ignore it, bending portions of Freud's essay to his will while scrapping what he does not deem necessary. Had he thoroughly engaged with Jentsch and Freud's variations of the uncanny in his literary criticism of Wuthering Heights-acknowledging the importance of the definitional variants of the uncanny as well as the significance of Freud's repetition compulsion in regard to his own argument-Miller would have evaded his misuse of the term altogether and likely would have strengthened his argument as well. In order to reach such a conclusion, though, we must begin with what Miller neglects to put forth in his essay: a brief explanation of Jentsch and Freud's work with the uncanny, as well as how as much may aid in enhancing Miller's …show more content…

With this in mind, the history of the uncanny as an academic term chiefly centers on the work of two individuals: Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. The prior, while having written a "rich" but not particularly "exhaustive" literary analysis of the term, reduced the notion of the uncanny to a sense born from "intellectual uncertainty" (Freud 123-5). Before delving into Freud's personal qualms with the term, it is undoubtedly worth mentioning that Jentsch's focus on intellectual uncertainty aligns with Miller's arguments about Brontë's artful circumlocution through Wuthering Heights. In Jentsch's own words, the uncanny is "always [an] area in which a person [is] unsure of his way around" (Freud 125). Consequently, despite his explicit mention of Freud's variation of the uncanny in his essay, Miller's insistence that Wuthering Heights resists "rational reduction to some satisfying principle of explanation" through its over-rich content staunchly marks his argument about the source of the uncanny as reliant on the perpetual intellectual uncertainty of the reader (Miller 52). Miller points to the multitude of signs present in the novel as an elaborate ruse on Brontë's part, meant to persuade her readership into

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