The “replicants” in this movie are entirely biological creatures, designed bygenetic engineers in the early twenty-first century to be “off-world” slaveson space colonies. When four stage a violent escape and return to earth tofind their maker, they are hunted down and killed as dangerous monsters.The movie powerfully evokesFrankenstein, but concludes by converting itshero to the replicants’ cause. The artificial creatures end up seeming more“human” than the people who stalk them

n response, I’d suggest that just as we “lose ourselves” in narratives that we find in novels, we can also lose ourselves (read: produce unexpected results) in a dictionary or other reading materials by tracing out connections and relations that exist within but across the alphabetic or logical argument imposed upon the piece.

paradigmatic

Coupled with the moral position of striving to please parents and teachers and avoid the public ridicule of classmates, the style of reading we engage these simple narratives becomes the foundation for how we eventually read all other things. Because we like suspense and the slow reveal of character and plot development, we read in a linear fashion that allows the author of a written work to set the pace. Of course, simple narratives are not the only reading we encounter in school and life, but all those other reading materials—dictionaries, instruction sets, academic writing—lack the formalized instruction that accompanies our first reading experiences. All reading becomes based in the style of one type of reading material.