English 379, Representing Non-Humans, satisfied my Global Citizenship perspective. I took this class finding it interesting because I believed it would focus on how fantasy creatures and races are presented in the literature. I was incorrect as we did not focus on any fantasy novels in that sense but did still go in an interesting direction filled with just as much philosophy and critical thinking about presentation. Over the course of the class we read three main books: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “House of Leaves,” and “Crystallography.” The first was a fantasy-esque novel being the inspiration for blade runner and dealt with the integration of androids into human societies, the treatment of classes of humans, and emotions. This was the first book we read and had discussions sometimes also showing scenes from the movie (Blade Runner) to give a visual context for what happened. The next book we read was “House of Leaves” and was a bit of a turn with it flipping between viewpoints and timelines. It was a bit hard to read but very interesting how the book weaved together all the viewpoints and integrated the uncanny into the text. It reminded me a lot of the quote by Nietzsche “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The last major book we examined was selected poems from “Crystallography” which used various methodologies to convey meaning in the poems.
Below you will find my second paper of the class on “House of Leaves” detailing how the uncanny is integrated into the book and brilliantly makes the reader experience the same feeling as the characters in the book.
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