...Ruminations ...

... The final chapter returns to Hamlet , then ruminates on dreams as expressions of the self. It looks at the enigma encrypted in da Vinci’s Mona Lisa . It meditates on felfies—selfies, some of them historical, that are doctored to achieve particular effects. And it talks about life as an album...

... that conveys that the zombie is a morally and futuristically cautionary figure. The chapter ruminates not only on the figure of the zombie but also more generally on the ways the genres of horror and science fiction, seemingly removed form literary realism, can adeptly effect social critiques of colonialism...

... This chapter provides an extended rumination on Roland Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph, the famously absent image at the center of Camera Lucida . Entering debates about the existence of the image, it proposes, through a reading of Barthes’s posthumously published Mourning Diary...

... critical ecological functions—some break down chitin, the hard material in the exoskeleton of insects, and others live in the hind guts of ruminants, where they help digest cellulose, a molecule in dead plant matter that is hard to break down. Chytrids generate spheres nested within other spheres, clear...

... and futuristically cautionary figure. The chapter ruminates not only on the figure of the zombie but also more generally on the ways the genres of horror and science fiction, seemingly removed form literary realism, can adeptly effect social critiques of colonialism and its legacies. Junot Díaz Caribbean...