(unheimlich)
That which is unfamiliar---or more literally, un-homely---in the familiar or homely. In a famous essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), Freud, Anna argued that the uncanny is the feeling we get when an experience that occurred by chance suddenly feels fateful and inescapable. His own quite humorous example of this is an anecdote about an afternoon walk he took in a small provincial Italian town in which he happened upon the brothel district and though he hurriedly exited the area the continuation of his walk somehow brought him back there, twice, a discomforting fact that he felt was noticed by the locals. He traces the uncanny feeling this provokes in him back to infantile psychology because it clearly evidences a compulsion to repeat and argues that anything that reminds us of this aspect of our childhood will be perceived as uncanny. Literature then is able to create the same feeling by evoking situations in which a character acts without reason, or, more particularly, returns when they are thought to be gone---the archetype of this is the ghost or the zombie. The uncanny is not a new thing; it is always an old, and usually repressed, thing that recurs in the place where it is not expected. Russian literary critics Todorov, Tzvetan uses the concept of the uncanny in the development of his theory of fantastic literature in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970).