“I Want to be Human”, uncanny collapse in contemporary gothic fiction with reference to Isaac Marion's warm bodies

Abstract EN

In Gothic fiction, monsters/ otherness are always taken as metaphors of something alienated, abject, uncanny - something to be avoided so that the system is restored.

They are excluded from any social belongingness, and hence a distance is created between “self” and “other”.

However, the present paper discusses the collapse of the notion of the uncanny monster in contemporary Gothic fiction.

It focuses on Isaac Marion’s, as a contemporary writer, a new representation of the monster in which more human characteristics are given.

In Marion’s novel Warm Bodies(2010), the monster is not completely alienated in the sense that it appears to be normal and longs to be a human.

The curiosity of wanting to find out what has changed with the zombie myth led to the topic of this essay.

The challenge that Marion puts forward is to make literature relevant to overarching contemporary issues, particularly the widespread destruction of the huge gap between “self” and “other”.

The paper concludes that zombification is culturally oriented and that the Otherness/zombie in contemporary fiction is not something bad to be avoided.

Instead, the zombie appears romantic and sexy with emotions and selfhood.