for thinking people
July 3, 2018
One sunny morning, four months ago, I decided I don’t want to use Facebook anymore. It had nothing to do with security concerns, mind you. I’ve been lucky enough to be a kid in the age when computers and games were still meaningful, so I’ve learned the lesson well: if you don’t want something public, don’t put it online. Facebook is not the problem, the user is. And, in my case, it proved other things, too.
June 25, 2018
Note: the following article on metatextuality in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 163-165) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the Tampere University Press pages. For a list of my other academic publications, see the related page of my website.
Gothic texts regularly display a connection to other texts, especially Gothic ones. This occurs as means to self-reference, and also to facilitate a certain temporal association. Bram Stoker’s Dracula refers to a number of Shakespearean works, to Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, and to John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, among others. Under these allusions exists a vast, complex network of interconnected meanings. These metatextual beacons create a connection of any given Gothic narrative with its tradition, at the same time perhaps assigning new meaning to its predecessors, much like Jorge Luis Borges’s claim in “Kafka and His Precursors”, where he compares Kafka’s work to some older texts:
Kafka’s idiosyncrasy, in greater or lesser degree, is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist … The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (1964, 108; emphasis in the original)
In many ways, the Gothic seems to be ontologically aware of itself, Indeed, on many occasions the term “meta-Gothic” could be employed to describe texts that “[reflect] upon the meaning of Gothic conventions, disclosing the points of connection between genre and discourse” (Miles 1993, 96).
June 19, 2018
“I trust you,” you might tell your friend who insists she can fix your mobile. “Our marriage is based on trust,” you might also hear someone saying. Or, perhaps in moments of semi-conscious introspection, one might say “I guess I’ll have to trust that you know what you’re doing.” This latter phrase reveals that trust is a choice. You choose to trust people, and you choose not to trust them.
There are several aspects that trust involves, and the dynamics are quite complex. Perhaps this is partly due to “trust” being a word that (like love) is misunderstood and misused a lot.
