Essays on Uncanny

The poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" belongs to the works of the so-called "Arthurian cycle" since it tells about the adventures of Gawain, a knight of the Round Table, and the nephew of the legendary King Arthur. Translated by James Winny, the poem reveals the story about Sir Gawain's risky undertakings to meet the Green Knight. Sir Gawain agreed to hit the Green Knight with his axe but in return, he has to be struck back a year and one day later. The development of the plot of the poem is built on the conflict as well ...

The twenty first century has already seen a rapid technoligization of practically every aspect of life. Indeed, it could not but affect the labor force. The question is: in what way has it done so? Firstly and foremostly, apart from obvious computerization, we can speak of robots being introduced in the labor force environment. There are two facets of this process – the positive one and the negative one. As for the first, robots have taken on the most difficult and in certain cases most dangerous work. As for the second, it may be justly maintained that robots have endangered ...

Recently, the cable television station HBO aired the first season of a series called True Detective which was filled with uncanny, eerie, and weird imagery, symbols, and dialogue. The show became a major hit, and brought a great deal of attention to the various American literary traditions of horror and weird fiction. One of the major writers mentioned as an influence on the show was H.P. Lovecraft, one of the most famous of American horror writers. However, H.P. Lovecraft was himself part of a tradition that went back to nineteenth century American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote dark ...

We live in a world where there is good and evil. Since time immemorial, stories told by humans have always had heroes and villains. Human culture has always been rife with tales of heroism, both real and fictional, wherein awe-inspiring individuals faced immense adversity only to overcome it and accomplish good in the end. In the last century, these stories have taken a new turn in introducing fictional characters that are superhuman. The heroes in such storylines who’re more commonly referred to as superheroes are capable of feats that, by any standard, far exceed human capabilities. It is ...

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 science fiction film Under the Skin is a supremely stylized, innately profound work that utilizes kaleidoscopic visuals and an unsettling performance from Scarlett Johannson to explore issues of the male gaze and take them to their furthest conclusion. Telling the story of an alien (Johansson) who comes to Earth and entices men with sex for her own twisted, mysterious purposes, Under the Skin charts the progression of a woman’s experience by simultaneously giving her a power and a predatory agency that women are not typically afforded, then stripping that agency away bit by bit ...

In Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny, he describes modern city architecture as cold, unfeeling, completely bereft of time or place. When an inhabitant lives in the city, they do not gain a sufficient understanding of where the buildings come from, or the intention behind them. Ideally, city architecture forms a “memory map” of monuments that allows citizens to form an image of a city that they can recognize as familiar and protected. This is done through monuments, which are “agents of memory” (p. 177). However, modernism twists the memory map to make people forget as well as remember – it erases ...