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Honors Thesis Main MenuSandrine Servant5c2e19aad007c90d56dee4e8069be4be7bd025ce
Objects and the Uncanny
12019-04-11T15:13:17-07:00Sandrine Servant5c2e19aad007c90d56dee4e8069be4be7bd025ce335819Decline - Moment Fatalplain2019-04-29T01:17:50-07:00Sandrine Servant5c2e19aad007c90d56dee4e8069be4be7bd025ceThe Picture of Dorian Gray In the Picture of Dorian Gray, the uncanny appears in the first few pages of the novel as it opens with the infamous portrait and the painter announcing he has just completed it. However, the uncanny truly manifests itself as well as it's harrowing and spine-chilling effects in the second half of the novel when the innocence of Dorian is forever corrupted and he fully engulfs himself in this new way of being. Therefore, in an attempt to demonstrate this all well as the degradation of the painting (object) which is happening simultaneously to the corruption of Dorian's soul is by visualizing the vocabulary used in descriptions of the second half of the story, especially with the loom visualization which allows to visually see Dorian's decent. The word "Dorian" follows a drastic fall in the visualization mirroring the one the character experiences in the novel.
La peau de chagrin The uncanny and objects are very much interrelated in this novel as the fantastique appears within the most elaborate and detailed description of a shop and oppressive bourgeois interior I have ever read. I chose to focus on the very lengthy description in Le Talisman of the antique shop to showcase the intrinsic relationship between objects and the uncanny which is epitomized in this description.
The Tale of the 672nd Night I argue that the uncanny in the Tale of the 672nd Night appears in the jewellery shop, when the merchant's son purchases the trinkets. It is at this moment that his fate is sealed and his descent in to the dephts of the city (or his own personal type of hell) begins. It will only end when he looses the trinket and scrambling to pick it up the horse will kick him, ultimately killing him. To visualize the apparition of the uncanny in this short story, I decided to use the passage where the merchant son't enters into the jeweller's shop and purchases the fatal objects. The visualization is a word cloud of the main words used in this passage and therefore the champ lexical of the uncanny in this text.
