ERH 322 (Cultural Context)
Literary Analysis of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe
This essay for American Literary Traditions was focused on deeply analyzing how Lovecraft and Poe utilized the uncanny in writing their short stories “Dagon” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The main aspect I learned from this essay was just how careful each author was in crafting their own unique way of using the uncanny in their works. Each took a highly different approach to its application, and used it to form the foundation of the extensive amount of fear and wariness the reader was meant to feel. Knowledge of this profoundly influenced my understanding of how some theoretical concepts that may seem miniscule or irrelevant to the overall goal of a work play a far more crucial role once closely analyzed. Being taught on how to deeply read into a work in all of our classes developed a distinct sensitivity for realizing the importance of normally-obscure concepts such as uncanniness itself. This essay was meaningful to me specifically for the importance it placed on being able to identify the importance of an easily overlooked idea, such as uncanniness, and to thoroughly research how each author used the term until it was very clear on how vital the concept was to forming their methodology for writing horror stories. This process helped greatly in developing the research for my capstone and has proven vital in underscoring the importance of the vague concept of kairos in my current project. The knowledge taken from this topic has mainly encouraged me to use the same process of deeply analyzing a relatively obscure concept and showing how it acts as a core element in a field of study, and applying it to my capstone in order to understand the role kairos plays in contemporary civic education.