Doppelgänger: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Freud’s The Uncanny

THURSDAY 7 NOVEMBER, 5.30 for 6 pm - 8 pm @ in.Studio (268 Pirie Street, Adelaide)

FRIDAY 8 NOVEMBER, 9.45 am - 4 pm @ Hartley Concert Room (The University of Adelaide)

Join keynote speakers Maria Takolander, Marion Campbell and David McCooey to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Freud’s The Uncanny.

“When all is said and done” Freud argued, “all those themes of the uncanny which are most prominent are all concerned with the double”.

As part of this symposium, papers, presentations, and performances will explore the uncanny and its contemporary doubles, answering the following questions:

• What new forms of terror come to us in the form of the double?
• Can new figurations of the double procreating on screen and text be illuminated through Freud’s thesis?
• What light can The Uncanny shed on the tyranny of sameness, narcissism and other doublings of the ego manifest in contemporary rhetorics of populism and nationalism?
• How are contemporary artists and writers deploying the double to illuminate contemporary nightmares?
• How might double readings and double meanings keep open the strangeness of everyday life?

David McCooey is a Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. His poetry has been widely anthologised, and his poetry collections have won or been shortlisted for six major literary awards. McCooey is also a musician and composer. His most recent collection of poetry is Star Struck (UWA Publishing, 2016) and his latest album, The Apartment (with words by Paul Hetherington), was released as a digital download in 2018.

Maria Takolander is a prize-winning fiction writer and the author of The Double (and Other Stories) (Text, 2013). She is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. Her poetry books include Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009) and The End of the World (Giramondo, 2014).

Throughout her work Marion Campbell has tried to challenge the politics of representation through a poetics of resistance – in poetry, (third body Whitmore Press 2018; Fragments from a paper witch Salt 2008, a finalist in the 2010 Adelaide Festival Literature Awards: Innovation), novels (the most recent of five being konkretion UWAP 2013), playscripts, and memoir (The Man on the Mantelpiece UWAP 2018). Her novels have been shortlisted for Australian awards and twice for the Canada-Australian Prize, with Not Being Miriam winning the WA Week Prize for fiction back in 1988. Her critical monograph Poetic revolutionaries (Rodopi 2014) explored intertextuality and subversion. She supervises graduate writing projects at Deakin University. https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/writing-and-literature/marion-may-campbell/

To submit a proposal, please email the centre.

Image "Family Portrait" © Jennifer Rutherford