Grounded and Ungrounded: Technology of Space in Dracula
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
Utopia and Mapping the Imaginary
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
MAZE: Playing Between Image and Text
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
Hell’s Black Intelligencers: Shakespeare and Our Current Fears of Surveillance
In July 2018, the United States government formally pressed charges against Maria Valeryevna Butina for operating as an unregistered foreign agent operating in the service of the Russian state, a term that the news media quickly collapsed into the more provocative and instantly recognizable designation of “Russian spy.” Coupled with the revelation that the Russian
“Millions of false eyes”: Responding to Surveillance
Surveillance culture doesn’t crop up overnight. It is the result of social and political processes, which humans creatively adapt to and undermine. Last week, I looked at the ways in which early modern audiences and playwrights reacted to the increasing sense that their government was using spies to monitor their actions in and around the
They Come Not Single Spies: What Surveillance Meant to Shakespeare’s Audiences
After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572,[1] the English government, particularly Principle Secretary Francis Walsingham (often credited as the father of English espionage), greatly increased the scope of their intelligence networks. This resulted in the foiling of a number of plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, most notably the Babington Plot, which led
Cloaked in Eyes and Ears: Reading Surveillance Culture Through the Early Modern Stage
In our contemporary social moment, the American public has come to possess a fairly blasé attitude towards the degree to which governments and corporations collect our data and monitor our actions. It has become almost an unfunny joke to acknowledge that, yes, Amazon and Google do monitor our internet habits and listen in upon our
Lakitu and Leaning In: What a Video Game Can Teach Us about Introduction
I am deciding to end this series on interesting introductions with video games for a couple of reasons, the most pressing of which is that I wanted an excuse to write about Super Mario 64. Released for the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Super Mario 64 is not the first game I played, nor is it
Captivating “Us”: What a Film Can Teach Us About Introductions
I first decided to watch Jordan Peele’s Us on a relatively bright morning … on my phone … while I was on an airplane. This is far from the best context to get a good impression of anything, much less a densely loaded horror film like Us. The fact that these opening moments stuck with
Of Feet and Hobbit-Holes: Lessons Learned from a Literary Intro
Literature is full of great beginnings. There are plenty to choose from — Austen’s “truth universally acknowledged,” Dickens’s contradicting description of the best (and worst) of times, Orwell’s clocks’ striking thirteen, etc. — each with their own merits. But I want to start this series on effective introductions with a line that I will always