A roll about films and books our students have found worth writing about.
In classical mythology, the faun became an emblem of lust (replacing the satyr) and raw instinct attracted to nymphs. Stéphane Mallarmé’s Afternoon of a Faun elaborates on this meaning through the recollections of a Faun – the lyric voice – woken from his afternoon nap and reflecting on his dream with nymphs. In Nabokov’s Palace…
Last time we observed the profitability of a good old brand name, but what happens when a brand name and an immensely popular literary genre meet on the pages of an author whose strong individual characters try to steal the show? Is a true detective fiction novel only successful thanks to blood, or is there…
In this post I briefly present the first topic of my research in Moldova: newspaper strips, more precisely how elements of the comics’ medium (panels, speech bubbles, inscriptions) are used by editors to boost the quality of articles or even the quality of newspapers. Reading the basic work on comics The Penguin Book of Comics:…
It is not true. Coalhouse is not Kohlhaas. And never will be, as Doctorow is not Heinrich von Kleist. Still, the most complex character of Ragtime, by his name, deeds and fate resembles Kleist’s hero, Michael Kohlhaas. This is why I am going to explore the equivocal relation between them. Coalhouse is a name no…
It took three months before The Sunday Times and The Guardian shed light on the fact that the quietly published The Cuckoo’s Calling, debut piece by a mysterious author named Robert Galbraith, is – in fact – the first detective fiction novel of the universally acclaimed novelist, J K Rowling. As The Evening Standard reported…
“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open” (Austerlitz, 25) Architecture and objects are the basis of remembrance in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz and this is what made me interested especially in the process, how we remember and especially what circumstances and objects…
It’s awfully nice to do the unthinkable to yourself. Being a very adaptive personality I ventured to spend the spring semester in the Republic of Moldova. In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a bandit, who offered shelter to travelers and, once they accepted, took them to his bed, in which they had to fit. If the…
As tastes and trends change, video games continue to evolve, just like other forms of media. Recent years have seen the emergence of a new kind of gameplay: interactive narratives that emphasize practical and moral player choices. While decision making has always been a core feature of tabletop – and to some extent digital –…
No movie adaptation of a book can appear in the cinema without bringing along the repeated discussion of what makes a good adaptation. Articles deal with it, even Youtube videos deal with it, and when I was given the assignment to moderate the class of the movie adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, Ragtime, I…