THE COLLECTIVE UNCANNY, A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON DISPLACEMENT IN THE AMERICAN PROSE
This thesis establishes the novels Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), canonical literary works from the American Realism/Naturalism, as a starting point for a formal analysis of narratives which deal with representation of different human displacements: migration, immigrations and uprooting. Having these as a canonical reference os the mimetic mode, through comparative literature, I analyse three other American works: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), which also deal with displacements, but now via fantastic narratives that articulate the American structural racism through the collective uncanny. This thesis works on the premise that these selected authors, in dealing with the same theme as the previous ones, have their prose permeated, not only with their biographies e social-historical contexts, but also with historical subjectivities that the post-modernism searches for in its poetics.