The Unheimlich Manoeuvre: Literature and the 21st-Century Uncanny

This work outlines the emergence of a distinctively 21st-century literature and demonstrates how it engages with the anxieties and aporias of contemporary life. Reading the late fiction of Don DeLillo, Roberto Bolaño, and Cormac McCarthy, it outlines a shift away from the postmodern and towards the 21st-century uncanny. Heightened uncanniness—as developed by Freud and Lacan—accounts for contemporary symptoms such as social fragmentation, subjective indistinctness, the waning of symbolic authority, and intensified anxiety. This thesis examines how contemporary novelists find ways to employ, reveal, and combat this uncanniness in a literature that signals a renewed attentiveness to ethical responsibility.