May 2012

Welcome to the house of Count Dracula

Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the world, an ancient creature bent on bringing his contagion to London, the very heart of the British Empire. Only a handful of men and women stand between Dracula and his long-cherished goal, but they are vulnerable and weak against the cunning and supernatural powers of the Count and his legions. As the horrifying story unfolds in the diaries and letters of young Jonathan Harker, Lucy, Mina, and Dr Seward, Dracula will be victorious unless his nemesis Professor Van Helsing can persuade them that monsters still lurk in the era of electric light. Here, in one of Jonathan Harker’s diary entries, he meets Dracula for the first time…

Geek Chic

By Gary Alan Fine

Stigma seems a heavy burden to bear, but groups, when they band together in common cause, can reveal astonishing skills of communal jujitsu. Words can lose their moorings and be transformed through the alchemy of collective action: insults become identity markers, and outsiders can find a welcoming home.

Why read Faulkner?

By Philip Weinstein
Faulkner’s best novels show what it is like to live through baffling experience — experience that you can’t sort out while it is happening to you (crashing into you). They do more than “show” this; they enact it on the page. Attending to him responsively creates a kindred experience of bafflement, then of bafflement brought to order. But not brought to order before it registers on you, longer than you like.

A house of judgment for Oscar Wilde

On 25 May 1895, at the Old Bailey Courthouse, Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. A warrant for his arrest on this charge had been issued immediately after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury, which had also left him bankrupt. While imprisoned at Pentonville and then Wandsworth Prison, his health declined sharply, and following his release, he fled to France. A poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, and wit, Wilde lost the joy of writing in his final years. Whether or not it be “the love that dare not speak its name,” Oscar Wilde’s “The House of Judgement” shows he was no stranger to examination and judgement before his trial.

1940s children’s books: peeps into the past

Children’s books are like time machines. Coming across the same edition of a much-loved book from childhood can instantly transport an individual back to the moment of reading. That visceral reaction, however, is rather different from the time-travel experienced by scholars who are working with children’s books from earlier periods.

In Memoriam: Paul Fussell

Scholar Paul Fussell passed away on Wednesday at the age of 88. He was Donald T. Regan Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of several works, including three with Oxford University Press: The Great War and Modern Memory, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, and Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars. Named one of the twentieth century’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books by the Modern Library, The Great War and Modern Memory was the winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers students and researchers authoritative guides to the key literature in a wide variety of fields. Watch as Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, Krin Gabbard, a professor at Stony Brook University, discusses his role in the project and how Oxford Bibliographies is revolutionizing the way students do research online.

Playing with American Literature

By Kevin J. Hayes
Does anyone remember the card game Authors? I do. When we were children, my brother and sister and I had great fun playing the game. Authors was quite basic: its rules were the same as the rules for Go Fish. In Go Fish, players ask, “Do you have any aces?” or “Do you have any queens?” In Authors, alternatively, players ask, “Do you have any Shakespeares?” or “Do you have any Tennysons?”

Could a calorie tax or cuts in farm subsidies reduce obesity?

By Julian M. Alston and Abigail M. Okrent
Every day — whether in the supermarket, in restaurants, in the workplace, or preparing meals at home — each US adult makes hundreds of decisions about what foods to buy, what to eat, and when. From those myriad decisions has come an unwelcome, progressive rise in obesity and the social costs of obesity-related illness. In less than thirty years, the prevalence of obese Americans has more than doubled, and now more than one-third of adult Americans are obese.

The Brooklyn Bridge opens

This Day in World History
On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to great fanfare. With schoolchildren and workers enjoying a rare holiday, thousands flocked from Brooklyn and Manhattan to attend the dedication, led by President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland. The crowd cheered as Emily Roebling — wife of the chief engineer and an integral figure in its construction — became the first person to cross. That night, fireworks illuminated the sky.

Londoners calling: biography from the ‘bottom up’

How do you write a person’s life story? For contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography this is a familiar question and its answer depends, in large part, on who’s under discussion.

Obama v. Romney on Afganistan strategy

By Andrew J. Polsky
Several weeks ago, when asked about his policy on Afghanistan, Republican presidential-nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney said he would wait until he had spoken to his military commanders before deciding on a timetable to withdraw American troops. A recent report by David E. Sanger in the New York Times makes clear the striking difference in approach between Romney and President Barack Obama. Obama decided last year that he would conclude his Afghan troop surge in September 2012 and hold fast to his withdrawal timetable without conferring with General David H. Petraeus.

Bigger in size but equally ignorant: ‘shark’

By Anatoly Liberman
The fishy series in this blog began with shrimp, reached the heights of prawn, and now, bypassing countless intermediate steps, will offer a discussion of shark. I am sorry to admit that despite the monster’s size and voracity I can say deplorably little about the chosen subject, but, since I always deal with obscure vocabulary, I suffer from self-inflicted wounds and have no reason to complain. Before I come to the point, an apology is in order. While compiling my voluminous bibliography of English etymology, I didn’t encounter references to Tom Jones’s publication on shark.

Fears and celebrations

By Louis René Beres
Once each year, on my birthday, I look closely in the mirror, much more closely than on ordinary days. Each year, I grow more apprehensive, of the unavoidable ebbing away of life, of the lingering loneliness that has come ever so incrementally with the death of others, of the gnawing obligation as a husband, father and grandfather to stay alive myself, and of the utterly certain knowledge that there is nothing I can ever do to meet this “responsibility.”

Afghanistan’s other regional casualty

By Alexander Cooley
As NATO leaders gather in Chicago to garner international support for an Afghanistan drawdown and stabilization strategy, they should also consider the overlooked toll that the campaign has taken on the adjacent Central Asian states. Western security assistance has made the Central Asian states more authoritarian and more corrupt, while these trends are only likely to deteriorate as the drawdown of US and ISAF forces accelerates.

Decoding the beauty of pearls

By Nori Satoh
How beautiful pearls are. Pearls emit a complex pattern of brightness, each with completely different color combination. They have attracted human beings, especially women, for long time, but simultaneously they have attracted biologists with a long-standing question of how pearl oysters generate such beautiful biomineralized materials.