Edgar

Why the ‘Twilight’ Obsession Rages On (and On)

by Rimpa Khangura

It’s not just a legend; these mysteriously mortiferous creatures really do exist, albeit in our book stores and movie theaters, but that is enough to spawn a billion-dollar-based industry. From Count Dracula to Edward Cullen, vampires have remained a mysterious source of intrigue amongst audiences. But the real question on everyone’s mind is why exactly the Twilight franchise is so popular?

Remembering the Genius of Chris Marker

by Steven J. Chandler

Chris Marker wrote in the introduction to his 1997 multimedia CD-Rom Immemory, “I claim for the image the humility and powers of a madeleine.” In that CD-Rom and in many of his other creative endeavors, Marker continued the process of memory’s cartography. He embraced a multitude of genres as mapmaking tools, the span of his work communicating the dependence of the image to its memory. He cobbled together the realities of disparate cultures, mending the breaches in time through preservation of minutia and banality.

‘The Great Gatsby’ and the Loss of Hope and Innocence of an Era

by John McGovern

A film robs you of imagining the world of a novel as you want to, while a novel cannot as accurately capture the televisual world we now live in. Part of Gatsby’s appeal is its depiction of a time when the American dream was a promising ideal, when the U.S. was not, as Horace from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010) puts it, a “fat, demented pimp.” The Great Gatsby was written when the U.S. was on the upswing, and now that the nation is in decline, it makes sense that there will be nostalgia for the ‘good-old days’.