Shortly before my presentation on The Popular Uncanny at PARSEC last month, Heidi Ruby Miller interviewed me about the subject for their newsletter, SIGMA. You can read the full interview in .pdf format here; an excerpt follows… Excerpt: Miller: Why should we care about the uncanny, popular or not? Arnzen: The uncanny has been becoming […]
Author: Michael Arnzen
Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999.
Terror Management Theory and the Uncanny Valley (Video)
Here’s a video clip from my lecture last October at Neumann University on the Uncanny Valley. About an hour into the discussion of why androids and animatronics might creep us out, I gave this overview of “terror management theory” to explore how it applies to theories of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) and the representations of […]
From “The Uncanny Valley” Talk at Neumann University
Had a GREAT time in Philadelphia this past weekend, where I attended DogCon4 and delivered an address to Neumann University on “The Uncanny Valley.” MANY THANKS to Neumann University for supporting my trip, Dr. Bill Hamilton for inviting/hosting/handling, Dave Bullis for running the media, and of course, all my friends at Raw Dog Screaming Press […]
“The Uncanny Valley” Event: Guest Lecture at Neumann University 10.23.15
I will be giving a talk about “The Uncanny Valley”, free and open to the public, at Neumann University (near Philadelphia, PA) on the early evening of Oct 23rd. This event doubles as an early bird festivity for Raw Dog Screaming Press’ exciting conference, DogCon4. [Raw Dog is the parent company for Guide Dog Books, […]
Everything Is Uncanny
The latest print issue of Wired magazine (Sept 2015) includes a mini-feature story on “The New Cultural Literacy 2016,” which includes the above entry on the ubiquity of the uncanny valley in technological design. The phrase “Uncanny Valley” has indeed become so ubiquitous in discourse that it seems to be drummed up whenever anything is […]
The Clone Chores — aka. Return of the Maytag Men
Last June, I shared some observations about how das Unheimliche is employed in Maytag advertising that features the newest model of their Maytag Man spokesman. A year later, this great advertising icon is back in a new tv ad that has doubled-down on his inherent uncanniness…by framing the character as but one clone in a […]
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