Doppelgängers in Fiction | Episode 50

Today’s podcast is part of a series to accompany my current serialized novel, An Interpreter in Vienna, as we investigate the truth in fiction. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. As always, feel free to share any of your work related to the conversation. Thank you!

Photo by Jurica Koletić on Unsplash

A full AI-created transcript can be ased on the desktop version.

Keywords:

• Doppelgängers / Doubles

• psychoanalysis —> literature (& psychoanalytical critical theory)

• The Uncanny / Unheimlich

• literary examples

• film adaptation / “a copy of a copy of a copy…”

• twins

• (architectural uncanny)

• your fiction

Considerations for your work:

• How might the concept of a double or doppelganger enhance your message? Even if you don’t include a character or ghostly double, could elements of reflection and shadows, for example, push questions about one’s mind or society’s perspective further?

• Is there a duality to any of your characters? Do they grapple with different parts of themselves and perhaps try to suppress one or the other?

• How might allusions or intertextual connections to some of the famous double characters enhance a message in your fiction? (Below, Blunt uses Dorian Gray to such implicit effect.)

  **We’ll look at the space and setting of the uncanny in a few weeks when we come back to The Architectural Uncanny (Anthony Vidler) in relation to our discussion of Vienna.

Feel free to share your related work or recommendations in the comments.

Texts:

• Otto Rank: Der Doppelgänger / The Double, 1914 (translation 1979)

• Sigmund Freud: The Uncanny (Unheimlich), 1919

• Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world, Naomi Klein

• NYT review of Klein

• https://www.etymonline.com/word/doppelganger

• Language A: Concept-Based Learning (my book, pp. 124-131)

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

• Fight Club — book, Chuck Palahniuk ⬩film, David Fincher

• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (full text)

• books about twins (The Guardian)

• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

• The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett

• Passing, Nell Larson

• Le Chemin de Jada, Laura Nsafou & Barbara Brun

• “Brit Bennett Reimagines the Literature of Passing” (The New Yorker")

• Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

• Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

• Singh SM, Chakrabarti S. A study in dualism: The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indian J Psychiatry. 2008 Jul;50(3):221-3. doi: 10.4103/0019-5545.43624. PMID: 19742237; PMCID: PMC2738358.

• Kinder, Elizabeth, and Patricia Pender. “‘A Copy of a Copy of a Copy’: Framing the Double in ‘Fight Club.’” Literature/Film Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2014): 541–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43798990.