Haunted Houses, Horror Literature and the Space of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Literature

Abstract

In his well-known essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Freud posits an intrinsic relationship between the experience of what he terms ‘the uncanny’ and spatiality. According to Freud’s definition, the uncanny occupies a fundamental position in that it manifests itself in the alteration of a space which, having hitherto been perceived as familiar, becomes the opposite: an unhomely space inhabited by otherness; a space which loses its familiar quality because it has been invaded and altered. The uncanny is thus linked to the affect with which a subject relates to a given space: to the affect with which a space is charged and to the transformation of this affect into another — predictably its opposite.