Subjects Not-at-home is the first book-length study of the concept of the uncanny ( Das Unheimliche ) in the context of French literature. It explores the ways in which certain contemporary French novelists are exploiting the themes, imagery and dynamics of the uncanny to generate a repertoire of narrative tactics for the portrayal of the chez soi . Through an analysis of nine novels by Marie NDiaye, Eugène Savitzkaya and Emmanuel Carrère, the author reveals a developing tendency within current writing to re-appropriate figures of the strange – the double, intellectual uncertainty, the fragmented body, the spectral, the haunted house – in order to represent the ‘familiar’ spaces of the home, the family, the self and the everyday. This problematic is situated with respect to tendencies in present-day French writing, with the uncanny being viewed as a particular approach to the contemporary novel’s inclination to privilege the site of the chez soi . Readings of the literary texts are informed by philosophical, psychoanalytic and literary |