This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

Freud’s investigation of mental life took him beyond psychoneuroses and dreams to other phenomena of waking life. Though well aware of behavior requiring no special explanation, he identified some occurrences on which he thought he might productively bring his explanatory apparatus to bear. Those occurrences consist of short-term behaviors and experiences that, although common, elude straightforward explanation, thus licensing Freud to explore the applicability of the mechanisms he had ascribed to other instances of non-ordinary functioning.

The chapter examines his treatment of the mental glitches he called parapraxes – small involuntary errors, like slips of the tongue – and jokes, as well as more passive experiences like getting lost in a book and the feeling of the uncanny. In each instance, Freud builds a more compelling case than he does with respect to dreams that processes along the lines he proposes are needed to produce the result in question.

This chapter uses Freud’s understanding of the uncanny to interrogate the ambivalent relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. It suggests that managerial infra-law can appear uncanny from an international legal perspective: it looks like law, it sounds like law, but its documents, statements, speeches, and dialogues are empty words and dead letters. Infra-law is uncanny because it is inarticulate. The chapter refrains from using this insight to nostalgically affirm juridico-political government. On the contrary, international lawyers’ attempts to abject management (in Julia Kristeva’s sense) are symptomatic of deeply rooted problems within juridico-political systems. The chapter argues that juridical authority stifles law’s responsiveness and ability to articulate grievances against the status quo. The chapter uses this insight to argue for a version of legal advocacy capable of articulating complaints against the injustices of security measures. The force of law, on this model, derives not from its own authority but from the anger generated by injustice. Law can shift its horizon of responsiveness, the discussion concludes, by learning to listen to those whose security is sacrificed to collective security, and to articulate their complaints.

An examination of the precarity and poverty of dispossessed lives in India, see through narrative non-fiction by Katherine Boo and Sonia Faleiro and with reference to Hollywood and Bollywood cinema.

From the uncanny werewolf families and zombie border patrol guards in the novels of Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) to the digital citizens and virtually-enhanced tourists in Cherokee writer Blake Hausman's novel Riding the Trail of Tears, Native Americans are creating strange and scintillating new worlds of unforeseen horrors and possibilities. Such works engage the popular genres of horror and fantasy in order to mobilize sophisticated political critiques of capitalism, globalization, and the colonial imbrications of Indigenous peoples, albeit in surprising, genre-bending forms. This chapter explores the features of this new and vibrant field, offering readings of some of its most provocative titles and suggesting ways that such works can help critics and readers chart fresh, productive pathways into both the histories and the futures of North American Indigenous populations. In the very act of strengthening and deepening the connections between the speculative and the real, Native writers craft methodologies of resistance.

The threat of death and femininity converges on the dead female body which is stabilized and symbolized through limiting myths of femininity that augment women’s unhomely sense of a lack of accommodation within the cultural imaginary. In order to examine the possibilities for resisting the enforcement of silence on women’s bodies and their experiences by tropes of death and femininity, this chapter explores staging the ritual of sacrifice in Marina Carr’s Ariel (2002) and Edna O’Brien’s Iphigenia (2003), and probes the performance of the ‘good death’ in Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006). How might the beautiful feminine corpse be reappropriated in order to destabilize woman’s petrification as a monument to death and silence onstage? This chapter focuses on how the three plays render the uncanny and unhomely visible and disruptive in performance. Moreover, these myths of death and femininity still have currency and offer recognizable cultural forms; discussion of Ariel, Iphigenia and Woman and Scarecrow addresses the potency of these myths within Celtic Tiger Ireland, and within the context of postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks.