Using the theoretical frameworks of Freud, Todorov, and Bahktin, this
book explores how American writers of the late 20th century have
translated the psychoanalytical concept of "the uncanny" into their
novelistic discourses. The two texts under scrutiny - Paul Auster's
City of Glass and Toni Morrison's Jazz - show that the uncanny has
developed into a crucial trope to delineate personal and collective
fears that are often grounded on the postmodern disruption of
spatio-temporal continuities and coherences.