An Uncanny Education: Repression and Autodiegetic Narrative in James Joyce’s “An Encounter”

초록

Recent psychoanalytic and queer criticism on James Joyce’s “An Enounter” has addressed the numerous forms of uncanny doubling in the story and the ways in which various types of repressed sexual, colonial, religious, and pedagogical violence are unmasked. Focusing on the significance of first-person narration in the construction of the uncanny, I argue that these critics have misread key aspects of the story by too easily conflating the perspectives of the young boy and adult narrator. Instead of focusing on the uncanny resemblance between the boy’s school experience and encounter with the old man, this article contends that the encounter with the old man stands in as a screen memory for a deeper sexual trauma lurking below the surface of the text. The story’s narrator takes on a far more active and manipulative role in the construction of events than most critics have recognized, and it is the adult narrator’s confrontation with his repressed memory, rather than the young boy’s experience with the old man, that constitutes the real encounter of the story.

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