The uncanny and the ghostly nature of the world in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980)

Gabriele Biotti

Abstract


This article analyzes Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) in its complex textuality, where ghosts, spectrality and repetition compulsion play a relevant role in defining the symbolic space of a contemporary gothic story about madness, fear, evil traces and perception. In a context where time is out of joint, and where evil laws try to frame human presences in a dimension of distress, spectral presences shape a ghostly world where fears and violence are defeated by a special mental strength, the 'shining'.


Keywords


Spectrality; archive; ghosts; time; otherness.

Full Text:

PDF

References


Davis, C. (2013). État présent. Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms. In M. del Pilar Blanco, & E. Peeren (Eds.), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (pp. 53-60). New York, London: Bloomsbury.

del Pilar Blanco, M. & Peeren, E. (Eds.) (2013). The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory New York, London: Bloomsbury.

Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International. New York, London: Routledge.

Derrida, J. (1996). Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Falsetto, M. (2001). Stanley Kubrick. A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. New and Expanded Second Edition. Westport: Praeger Publishers.

Luckhurst, R. (2013). The Shining. London: Palgrave.

Royle, N. (2003). The uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Weinstock, J. A. (2013). Introduction: the Spectral Turn. In M. del Pilar Blanco, & E. Peeren (Eds.). The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (pp. 61-68). New York, London: Bloomsbury.

Wolfreys, J. (2013). Preface: On Textual Haunting. In M. del Pilar Blanco, & E. Peeren (Eds.), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (pp. 69-74). New York, London: Bloomsbury.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2019.43.4.77-87
Date of publication: 2019-12-30 00:00:00
Date of submission: 2019-03-08 09:26:25


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1476
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 1309

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2020 Gabriele Biotti

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.