Dec 11, 2015
Thank you all for the wonderful semester! It was one of the best classes I have ever had.
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Türkiye
seen from Sweden
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Israel
seen from Sweden
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Indonesia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Indonesia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Greece
seen from Sweden
seen from Italy
seen from Netherlands
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from United States
Thank you all for the wonderful semester! It was one of the best classes I have ever had.
This episode of criminal minds is about a child who was created of incest. He is a "monster" who kills the two feuding families who come to find out are led by his parents
Freud: The Uncanny
While I was reading and attempting to decipher Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” I started to think about how it related to Paul Auster’s novel, “The New York Trilogy,” which pretty much celebrates the uncanny. Freud states that the uncanny is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. [The uncanny is] something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. When experiencing the uncanny, the unknown appears as something which is – paradoxically – familiar (Freud 132). In Auster’s “New York Trilogy” the uncanny could refer to the doubling effect and the terror or uneasy feeling it causes the reader. In Ghosts, Blue spies on Black and as Blue’s uncanny similarities to Black become clearer throughout the story, both Blue and the reader start to feel a little confused and uncomfortable. He feels uneasy because he feels like he has seen Black somewhere before, but he can’t figure out where. As he spends hours every day doing nothing but watching Black, he starts to realize that he and Black are basically the same person, or doubles of one another. The uncanny is what makes this story so interesting, yet also quite disturbing.
I also thought that the passage about children’s fear over losing their eyes was interesting and, of course, in typical Freud fashion, he has to relate it to castration. He writes, “The study of dreams, fantasies and myths has taught us also that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castration” (Freud 139). I had never heard of the “castration complex” before (or maybe I blocked it out of my mind), but I suppose I can understand it. I don’t have a neurotic fear of losing my eyes or other organs, but I certainly wouldn’t want to lose them if I had a choice. I thought it was interesting how he connects the castration complex and the fear of losing one’s eyes with the story “The Sandman.” He writes, “We would therefore venture to trace back the uncanny element in the Sand-Man to the anxiety caused by the infantile castration complex” (Freud 140). I tend to think that the majority of Freud’s theories that I have learned about are pretty out there and hard to come on board with, but his arguments nonetheless always serve as interesting topics of discussion at school. I don’t know if his theories would make good family dinner conversation, however.
After talking about book covers in class I wanted to pick a book cover that I think displays the major point in that book. The cover is of a man in pain. The main aspect of this book is about the main characters inner battle with his demons!
The Locked Room
I definitely liked this story the best of the three. It was fun to see the connections and to feel like you are searching for Fanshawe along with the author. This story felt very psychological to me (i.e. the locked room in the narrator’s mind) and as psychology is my major, this story became much more interesting to me. However, it also frustrated me. I really do not like books that don’t have a definitive answer, and Auster is all about not giving an answer. Cliffhangers drive me nuts. I don’t want to make up my own ending, I want to know what actually happens (and by actually I mean in the author’s fictional world...I know it’s fiction.) I did like trying to decipher who was who between the three stories. In class, for my presentation, I did not even touch upon the characters from Ghosts, as I am still so confused by that story. While I did enjoy the last story, I am so frustrated with the entire book and will definitely stay away from mystery novels for a while.
P.S. So looking forward to Freud!!!