This week, I’ll be working through the beginnings of a new reading of the gothic horror novel Dracula (1897) to both argue something about the novel and connect its work to broader themes in horror media. In this post, I’ll explore how the book’s villain-vampire Count Dracula is recurrently characterized as having a kind of groundedness, or an explicit physical connection to the Earth, which the...
In something of a loose association with my previous post, I’ll be writing and thinking this week about another interesting intersection between images and text. In particular, I’ll be exploring both old and new attempts to map Thomas More’s seminal text Utopia. Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major instance of the word “utopia” as we know it today. Derived from...
Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle reads the subtitle of Christopher Manson’s 1985 puzzle book MAZE. Manson’s book was originally advertised as a kind of puzzle “contest” in which the first reader to find their way from room 1 to room 45 and back again in 16 steps (or less, if possible) would win $10,000 dollars. The puzzle was solved in 1987, but the book remains an interesting early...