The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities, extracted from their complex initial contexts of production, launched into mass-market global circulation and transformed into packaged teaching texts (often within the framework of similarly commodified anthologies) within highly normed pedagogical systems. This article takes a third mass-market paperback novel, M. J. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1996), to make an argument about the ways in which postcolonial texts can also be read as anti-commodities, as auratic entities that resist commodification. As such, they give rise to affective networks within which commodities are constantly accruing social use values – thereby making them co-agents in processes of subversion and revivification.

Migraine headache is a highly prevalent and disabling neurological primary headache disorder. It is characterized by disabling, throbbing, episodic, unilateral headaches associated with neurologic features such as photophobia, phonophobia, or autonomic symptoms like nausea and vomiting lasting 4 to 72 hours at a time. Patients will often avoid bright lights or loud noises. About 30% of migraine patients experience auras which are unilateral focal neurological disturbances prior the headache onset, often manifested as visual, sensory, or motor symptoms. Pathophysiology of migraine headache is still unclear and is being studied; however, calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) is believed to play a major and important role, and therefore has become a primary therapeutic target. This was supported by the finding of CGRP release during acute migraine attacks and then subsequent normalization of CGRP levels after efficacious sumatriptan treatment. These findings have been a focal point in recent pharmacological developments in managing migraine headaches.

First-time seizures are a common part of neurology practice. Making an accurate and specific diagnosis is achievable by taking an excellent history. Clinicians should keep in mind that seizures are only part of the differential in a patient with a first-time event, with other diagnoses like syncope common as well. This history should focus on what the seizure feels like to the patient and looks like to observers. Two classification systems, the seizure semiology and International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), exist to make communicating complex information easier. Key semiology history includes the presence or absence of auras, altered awareness, or convulsions. In addition to history, laboratory, EEG, and imaging data can inform to the specific patient diagnosis. If you determine that the patient has had a first-time seizure without a clear epilepsy diagnosis, you can tell them seizure that the recurrence risk is 40%. If you determine the patient has epilepsy, you can tell them that 50% of people are seizure-free with the first medication used. Patients should be reassured that they can live normal lives with most jobs being obtainable and family life being a possibility if the patient so chooses.

The Introduction establishes the key theoretical approaches underpinning the book. C. S. Peirce’s taxonomy for signs as index, icon, or symbol offers a useful framework which I use as a helpful way to distinguish between different functions of Shakespearean photographs, and resist in arguing that all photographs operate across Peirce’s categories. The book’s reliance on Walter Benjamin’s work is also explained, particularly as it relates to the concept of ‘aura’, which I suggest has been used problematically in performance studies. The Introduction also explains my choice of case studies, and outlines the major scholars whose work the present book builds on, most notably the late Barbara Hodgdon.

Today, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is the best-known literary work that highlights the late nineteenth-century’s panoply of print and non-print media. This chapter analyzes how this focus allows the novel to set up a dialectic that has gone unremarked in previous critical accounts of it. In Dracula, gaps, losses, and incomplete translations between media become a source of uncanniness, producing the effect of the unreal and the paranormal. Yet the novel also presents the richness and particularity of multiple media giving way to the typewriter, a device that is supposed to yield that quintessentially modern substance, demediated information. With its vampiric power to feed on original media while converting and occulting them, the typewriter allows the novel to liquidate their aura of originality while keeping it hauntingly available, even undead.