The death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a contrarian reading in which Holmes helps the murderer, and the century-long tradition of the Holmesian Great Game with its pseudo-scholarly readings in light of an ironic conviction that Holmes is real and Arthur Conan Doyle merely John Watson’s literary agent. This paper relies on these events in t…[Read more]

The scholarly cataloguing and study of oral folktales, the evolution of Gothic fiction, the rise of the short story genre, the foundation of the Spiritualist movement, and the uncertainties and potentialities raised by scientific and technological advances, are some of the key influences in the fictional representation and uses of the ghost in…[Read more]

Short analysis of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Argues that Bakhtin’s description of modern parody as “narrow and unproductive” is undermined by Terry Pratchett’s postmodern, ludic parody, which is creative in a way which recalls precisely the carnivalesque parody valued by Bakhtin: It brings incompatible narratives together and destabi…[Read more]

Contribution to a series of short academic essays on poetry. Discusses Michael Kandel’s translation of Stanisław Lem’s poem on “Love and Tensor Algebra”, which appears in The Cyberiad. Discusses Kandel’s choice abandon both form and content in order to remain true to the original. Ties this to the poem’s use of mathematical imagery to argue th…[Read more]