Eerie, Eldritch Erlkönig Essays -- Goya, Sleep of Reasons Produces Mon

Goyas The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is an ominous image of the dark vision of humanity. A man sleeps, apparently peacefully, even though he is besieged by creatures associated in Spanish folk tradition with mystery and evil. There is an unhomely feeling of darkness as the brutes seem to move in closer towards to the man that accomplishes a scary environment in the aquatint (a method of etching that creates a rough sketch). A mysterious creature sits at the center of the frame, staring not at the sleeping figure, but at us, the viewer. Goya forces the viewer to become an active participant in the painting the monsters of his dreams even venture us. This creates a blur between the dream and the real ground an obscure boundary between fantasy and reality. As Freud would claim, we are faced with the reality of something that we shake off until now considered imaginary. This negative quality of feeling, filled with dread and horror, repulsion and anxiety, where the supernatura l becomes a part of common reality, is one of the uncanny. It is a frightening feeling which leads congest to something forgotten and lost. Similar to The Sleep of Reason, there is a sense of ambivalence in what is real in Hoffmans tale The Sandman. The uncanniness attaches directly to the figure of the Sandman, which a boy believed to be true in his childhood. Hoffman exploits disturbances of the ego that involve regression to times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others. Freud writes that the uncanny unheimlich is something which is secretly familiar heimlich, which has undergone repression and then returned from it. The music of Schuberts Erlknig dramatizes Goethes haunting poem in an uncann... .... It contained works (from 1800s and 1900s) that were dominated by themes of the uncanny, the hidden and the incomprehensible from the 1800 1900s. A spokesperson at the exhibition said, things that are mysterious or inexplicable will always evoke curiosity and interest.Works CitedFrancisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 17461828) EtchingFreud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny. New York Penguin, 2003. Print.Hoffmann, E. T. A., and Christopher Moncrieff. The Sandman, Surrey. N.p. n.p., n.d. Print.Kerman, Joseph, and Vivian Kerman. Listen. New York, NY Worth, 1980. Print.Gibbs, Christopher H. Komm, Geh Mit Mir Schuberts Uncanny Erlknig 19th-Century Music 19.2 (1995) 115-35. Print.Stein, Deborah. Schuberts Erlknig Motivic Parallelism and Motivic Transformation. 19th-Century Music 13.2 (1989) 145-58. Print.