Monday, December 13, 2010

The Vampire Novel: Reflection on the Course

After reading and reviewing your final project and essay proposals, I think it would be best to extend the deadline to MONDAY December 20th at 11:59 pm (midnight). I want to make sure you have enough time to create really successful final projects, and that you have an opportunity to ask any questions from me or have me or another classmate look at your drafts.

Since I will be extending the deadline, I would like for you to write one final blog before posting your final project. By Friday, December 17th at 11:59, I would like for you to post a reflection about the course. You can use the questions below to get you started.

What have you learned this semester? What sort of ideas, themes, concepts, and questions have we explored, and how have they helped you to understand the vampire figure and its significance in literature and in our culture? How have you developed a better appreciation for the novel? What sort of reading processes has this course encouraged and how do you feel you've developed as a reader and a writer? What novel had the greatest effect on you? Why? How have your thoughts about the vampire changed? Do you see this figure differently now since you began the course? How did you feel about the blog and discussion format of the course? Looking back on your work, is there something you would have done differently? Do you think you experimented enough with the format? Did you take risks with the questions provided, and did you take the opportunity to push your thinking and your analyses further? How did your peers affect the way you read these novels? How did reading your peers' blogs, comments, and posts change the way you approached these works? Are there a few blogs and posters that really stuck out to you as being particularly helpful and interesting, and what made them so? How do you feel about the quality of your final project? Do you think this final project has helped you to explore some of the course themes in more depth? How so?

Again, please post your responses to these questions by Friday, December 17th at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to comment on blogs.

Your final projects must be posted to your blogs by Monday, December 20th at 11:59 pm. As a precautionary measure, please email me any necessary materials by then, as well.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and “Childhood’s End: Let the Right One In and Other Deaths of Innocence” by John Calhoun

Please read the rest of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and “Childhood’s End: Let the Right One In and Other Deaths of Innocence” by John Calhoun (on D2L) for this week. Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

For this week, students will NOT have to post in the discussion forums.

1) John Calhoun argues that Eli “is a repository of adult fears about children, who are so like us yet in crucial ways so different, who are both vulnerable and demanding, and in touch with the id in ways that can elicit great anxiety and discomfort, especially when sexual stirrings begin to take form” (27). What does Calhoun mean by this statement? Describe his survey of the way in which “the child” has been conceptualized throughout history. What sorts of changes, evolutions, and characterizations have the idea of “the child” gone through? What does the recent wave of “horror stories” concerning childhood say about our current culture and our anxieties towards children? How does this novel “trouble” our ideas of childhood and “innocence”?

2) For this blog, do some internet research on Freud’s idea of the “uncanny” or “unheimlich.” How could this concept relate to the novel and to this statement by Calhoun: “Parents and other adults are supposed to protect children, and their potential failure to do so can be a potent source of horror: for both children and adults” (27)?

3) Calhoun cites the director of the film version of LTROI as saying, ““Sweden was halfway behind the Iron Curtain,” and the grim, Soviet-era feel of the housing blocks where Oskar and Eli live conveys the sense of a failed community; few residents seem to venture outside, or have contact with their neighbors, and they certainly aren’t watching out for the local children. The only real communal feeling depicted is among a group of barflies who don’t even have a proper bar to frequent, so they hang out in a dreary Chinese restaurant. Mostly unemployed, these marginal figures are forgotten wards of a welfare state, and in their drunken late-night wanderings are easy targets for predation” (27). For this blog, explore some of the lives of these “marginal figures” and the break down of community in this novel. To what extent is the “vampire figure” a symptom of this breakdown in this and other novels?

4) Calhoun not only remarks about the way in which children have been conceptualized as “innocent,” but the way in which girls in particular are markedly constructed as “clean and sweet-smelling, not [having] matted hair and emanate foul orders like both Regan [from The Exorcist] and Eli” (30). How does this novel and other novels we’ve read redefine and “trouble” strict gender constructions? Furthermore, how does Eli’s ambiguous gender blur the boundaries in terms of identity? What is the significance of the shift in pronouns in the middle of the novel? How does it change the way in which we read the second half of the book?

5) For this blog, explore the character Tommy. What are his motivations in the novel?

6) At the end of the novel, Gunnar Holmberg, a police officer, describes Eli as “an angel,” but “hardly one from heaven” (471). How would you describe Eli? Is she/he an angel? A hero? How does this character push the boundaries of our ideas of the vampire? How is she different from other vampires we’ve read this semester?

Monday, November 29, 2010

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

Please read parts one and two of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN for this week. Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

For this week and next, students will NOT have to post in the discussion forums. Because we are nearing the end of the semester, I think it would be best to focus on our blogs and your upcoming final projects.


1) The title of this novel is based on a song by Morrissey entitled “Let the Right One Slip In.”

The lyrics are as follows:

Let the right one in
Let the old dreams die
Let the wrong ones go
They cannot
They cannot
They cannot do what you want them to do
Oh ...

Let the right one in
Let the old dreams die
Let the wrong ones go
They do not
They do not
They do not see what you want them to
Oh ...

Let the right one in
Let the old things fade
Put the tricks and schemes (for good) away

Ah ... I will advise
Ah ... Until my mouth dries
Ah ... I will advise you to ...

Ah ... let the right one slip in
Slip in
Slip in

And when at last it does
I'd say you were within your rights to bite
The right one and say, "what kept you so long ?"
"What kept you so long ?"
Oh ...

What connections do you see between these Morrissey lyrics and the novel? Quote passages from the text to support your answer.
2) Among many things, this novel makes a direct commentary on public housing and the manufactured nature of the suburbs and explores its secrets and its inherent violence. On the second page of the novel, Lindqvist writes that only one thing was missing from these modern high rises—“a past.” He writes, “That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror.” What is the symbolism of the vampire in this context? What do you think Lindqvist is trying to say about modern life and its manufactured and mass produced spaces?

3) This novel takes place during the Cold War. How does this novel explore themes of “war” and “violence”? How can we read the bullying on the playground as a metaphor? For what, exactly?

4) How would you characterize the relationship between Håkan and Eli? What might their relationship be symbolic of? Adversely, how would you characterize the relationship between Oskar and Eli?

Monday, November 15, 2010

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE and George Haggerty's "Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture"

Please Interview with the Vampire and read George Haggerty’s essay “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture” (on D2L). Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) On page six, Haggerty asks, “How do we explain the eroticization of Rice's figures of the night? What is it about the male-male seductions of Rice's work that places them on bestseller lists and makes them the staple of shopping malls and supermarket check-out lines? What makes these tales of pulsing bodily fluids the hottest topic in suburban as well as urban US culture?” How does he attempt to answer these questions in his essay? What do you think of his response to Anne Rice’s works? Do you agree or disagree with his analysis and why?

2) On page eight, Haggerty writes, “Readers of The Vampire Chronicles are offered a conflicted relation to Lestat and his posturing. They are like the audience in the Theatre of the Vampires: they desire a voyeuristic participation in something they want to believe and disbelieve at the same time. Their attraction to these creatures of the night is also a repulsion. They need to witness the homoerotics of this world and to reject its power at the same time. This is an uncanny relation but also a tremendously powerful one.” Do you agree with his assessment? Have our forays into vampire literature been a type of “theatre”? Read back through pages 213-224 and the scene at the Théâtre de Vampires. How are we as readers placed in a position that is voyeuristic and “forbidden”?

3) Haggerty sees Rice’s novels as symptomatic of our culture’s discussion over “the AIDS crisis, the crisis over ‘family values,’ and the collapse of the war on drugs with its attendant militarization of civilian life and war on male potency (10). What does he mean by these claims and how does he set out to support them? Do you agree with this reading? Why or why not?

4) Haggerty writes, “Dead brothers abound in these novels: Anne Rice seems to find in these deaths the source of imaginative life, the beginning of the tale, its generative force” (13). The film version of Interview begins with Brad Pitt mourning the loss of his wife and child. How does that change, in your opinion, the meaning of the novel?

5) For this blog, do a google search on some key terms such as “postmodernism” and the “theatre of the absurd.” How do you think these artistic and philosophical movements inform Rice’s work?

6) On page 284, Armand calls Louis “the spirit of the age.” What does Armand mean by that? What is Louis’ response? Is a part of what attracts us to the character Louis is that he represents some “spirit” or zeitgeist of our age? What is that?

7) What do you think of the ending to this novel? Imagine you were the boy interviewing Louis. Would your response to Louis’ story be the same? Why or why not?

Monday, November 8, 2010

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

Please read up to page 158 (Part One) of Interview with the Vampire. Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) What differences do you see between the vampire characters in Dracula and I Am Legend and the vampire characters in Interview? Considering our previous encounters with vampires, how do we see the concept of "the monster" being complicated in this novel? Consider the narrative perspective in this novel. How does Louis's first person narrative affect the way in which we view him as a "monster"?


2) What is the significance of slaves and slavery in this novel? How might this aspect of America's corrupt and violent past serve as a metaphor for vampirism in this novel? How is the slave/master relationship evident between several of the characters in this novel? What might be the significance of this theme?


3) What is the significance of religion in this novel? What are some of the depictions of Catholicism in this novel? In broader terms, what sort of theological issues does this novel explore?


4) How might the vampire family we see in this novel be a "queering" of the traditional American nuclear family?

Sunday, October 31, 2010

1)Patterson argues, “It is my contention that the dramatic structure of Matheson’s novel contains a very clear, racially charged subtext that reflects the cultural anxieties of a white America newly confronted with the fact that it can no longer segregate itself from those whom it has labeled Other. This Other may be constructively viewed as a manifestation of what Toni Morrison has termed an “Africanist” presence” (19). How does Patterson go on to support her claims? Do you agree with her reading of I Am Legend? Why or why not? What is your opinion of Toni Morrison’s claim about an “Africanist presence”? What does she mean by this statement and how does it change the ways one might read these novels?

2) Explore Patterson’s ideas about women in I Am Legend. To what extent are the portrayals of women in the novel indicative of how women were viewed in the 1950s? What is the connection between women and “race” in this novel according to Patterson?

3) Patterson states, “In Neville’s worldview, hybrid blood equals contaminated blood. His obsessive studies of blood and his efforts to identify, prevent, and possibly cure blood contamination reflect a desperate desire to restore homogeneity and, with it, a social order that he recognizes.” What is the importance of “blood” in this novel? How is it similar or different to other discussion of “blood” in other vampire novels we’ve read? (23)

4) Patterson spends a great deal of time examining the representations of the “half breed” in this novel. She quotes H.L. Malchow who states,

“… there is also lurking in the vampire the powerful suggestion of an explicitly racial obsession – that of the “half-breed.” Both vampire and half-breed are creatures who transgress boundaries and are caught between two worlds. Both are hidden threats – disguised presences bringing pollution of the blood. Both may be able to “pass” among the unsuspecting, although both bear hidden signs of their difference, which the wary may read. “(168)

In your own words, explain where the anxieties surrounding the “half breed” come from and what they say about western notions surrounding “purity” and “race.”

5) Choose one of the stories in the later novels and explain its relationship to the vampire novel or the horror genre in general. How do some of the themes in I Am Legend relate to some of the other themes Matheson explores in these later stories?

6) How do the vampires differ from the vampires in the earlier novels we have read? Do you see a "shift" in behavior? Why do you think this is the case?

7) Neville ends the novel by saying, "I am legend." What does he come to understand at the end of the book? What does he mean by this statement?

Monday, October 25, 2010

I AM LEGEND

Please read up to page 163 of I Am Legend. Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) Last week we briefly discussed Arata’s claim that vampires in fiction are a sign of a troubled society riddled with anxiety about its possible decline. Given that Matheson’s novel was written in 1954, what sort of social anxieties do you think this novel reflects? Provide passages to defend your answer.

2) What do you think of Robert Neville as our “hero”? Is he a hero at all?

3) In this novel, we move from the conception of vampires as something supernatural and mystical to something biological. What is the role of science in this novel? What does this novel say about the promises, limitations, and dangers of modern technology?

4) How are these vampires different from other vampires we’ve seen and why do you think this is the case? What is Matheson’s vampire saying about the culture in which he wrote this novel?

Monday, October 18, 2010

DRACULA contd. and Stephen D. Arata's "The Occidental Tourist: DRACULA and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization"

Please read up the rest of Dracula and Stephen D. Arata’s essay “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization” (located in the Dracula edition assigned to this course). Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) Arata explains that Dracuala is an extension of the vexed “Eastern Question” (462) What does he mean by this? How do we see these anxieties playing out in the novel?

2) Arata exerts that the presence of vampires hearkens in “the decline of empire,” relating how Stoker “thus transforms the materials of the vampire myth, making them bear the weight of the culture’s fears over its declining status. The appearance of vampires becomes the sign of profound trouble” (465). What do you think he means by this statement? Given the flood of vampires in our contemporary culture--filled with financial meltdowns, political strife, and an increasingly heterogeneous immigrant population—are vampires a sign of “profound trouble” in our current society? How so?

3) On page 466, Arata claims, “All the novel’s vampires are distinguished by their robust health and their equally robust fertility. The vampire serves, then, to highlight the alarming decline among the British, since the undead are, paradoxically, both ‘healthier’ and more ‘fertile’ than the living.” What does he mean by these statements? What is the construction of Victorian masculinity in this novel? In comparison, consider how current ideas of masculinities are constructed in, through, and against more contemporary vampire characters.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

DRACULA

Please read up to page 159 of Dracula for next week. Below are a few questions we'll be exploring this week. Feel free to draw from them, or to develop your own questions. You should also feel free to respond to another student's post.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) In our edition of Dracula, Phyllis A Roth writes, "Perhaps nowhere is the dichotomy of sensual and sexless women more dramatic than it is in Dracula and nowhere is the suddenly sexual woman more violent and self-righteously persecuted than in Stoker's 'thriller'" (412). For your post, explore the depictions of women in the novel. Could "vampirism" be a way in which women can express an otherwise repressed sexuality? Consider Jonathan's run-in with the "Brides of Dracula." How is he both allured and repelled by these women? Explore how Lucy and Mina both exceed but then at times transgress the stereotype of the angelic, Victorian woman. In what ways do both characters play "dangerously" with the role of the New Woman? How does Vampirism become symbolic of "dangerous" female sexuality?

2) Examine the role of Dr. Seward in this novel. What do you think is the significance of the insane asylum in this novel? What is the significance of the emerging "science" of psychology in terms of the themes of this novel and with the idea of the vampire in general? Why is the character of Renfield signficant?

3) Explore Dracula's relation to modernity. What is the role of technology in this novel? How, and why, does it work side by side with superstition and ancient Catholicism? How does Dracula use modern technology for his own ends?

4) How does "blood" work symbolically in this novel? Consider the significance of the many blood transfusions that were given to Lucy. How might we consider the transference of blood as a sexual act? What does that say about the symbolic "exchange" of fluids in this novel? Given that Victorians were so obsessed with "blood," bloodlines, and "race," how could this constant exchanging of fluids and "mixing" be considered an "uncanny" sort of trope in the novel?

5) The novel Dracula is told from several perspectives. Choose one character and analyze how this character “tells” the story of Dracula. What sort of medium does this character use? How would you define or characterize his or her point of view?

6) Take a moment to read through mcmahont’s last blog on Carmilla and Orientalism. What similar themes do you see developing in Dracula? http://mcmahont.blogspot.com/2010/10/carmilla-from-perspective-of.html

Sunday, October 3, 2010

CARMILLA contd.

Please finish the rest of Carmilla and read through Tamar Heller’s essay “The Vampire in the House: Hysteria, Female Sexuality, and Female Knowledge in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla.’” You can find this essay on D2L.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) In “The Vampire in the House,” Heller connects themes of vampirism in Victorian literature with female hysteria. What sorts of connections does she draw in her essay? Do you agree with Heller’s analysis? Can we see Laura and Carmilla as extensions of the Victorian discourse surrounding “hysterical” women? How so?

2) Heller suggests Le Fanu’s Carmilla is an early version of what has become a very familiar narrative of the lesbian “vamp” devouring young girls. In this narrative, she writes, “Both the body of the lesbian and the mind of the victim she brainwashes are the site of a battle over who gets to define, and hence to control, femininity and its desires: women or the fathers, priests, and doctors who are the story’s male ‘knowers’” (80). What do you think she means by this statement? How do you see this sort of narrative functioning within Carmilla?

3) Within her essay, Heller connects vampirism with Victorian anxiety surrounding menstruation and masturbation. What are some of the connections she makes and would you agree with her interpretation?

4) Heller connects Carmilla’s vampyric presence with the East, saying, “This feminine invasion is figured in terms of imperialist anxiety, for Carmilla rides into Styria—already, because of its orientalism, an only tenuously domesticated zone—like the return of the repressed colonized Other” (84). For this blog, conduct an internet search on these two key terms—“orientalism” and the phrase “return of the repressed.” Share what you find with the class and explain how we might see Carmilla as a manifestation of imperial anxiety.

5) Along with our first “lesbian vampire,” this text also contains our first “vampire hunter” character. How would you characterize this figure? How is he described? Would you agree with what Heller implies in her essay that this character symbolizes “male” ways of knowing? Or is he some sort of conduit? Use examples from both the essay and Carmilla to explain your answer.

6) We only read Carmilla through a transcript written from Laura’s point of view. For this blog, feel free to rewrite a scene from another character’s perspective.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

CARMILLA

For next week, read to page 292 of Carmilla. As always, these questions are meant to help inspire and guide your reading. Feel free to develop your own questions or respond to another student’s blog.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

* Do a little research on the author and try to locate the historical, social, and political contexts in which he wrote his dark tales. In his day, Le Fanu was called "The Invisible Prince." How did he achieve this nickname and how did he work to perpetuate this persona? Also, you may want to do some independent research on any of the following terms: The Irish Famine, Young Ireland, or Catholic Emancipation. What could an understanding of these historical events bring to a reading of Carmilla? Make sure to quote from and provide links to your research sources.
* The metaphor of the vampire is certainly a capacious one. In terms of this novel, how might we see the metaphor of the vampire functioning in the Irish context? Who (or what) might Carmilla represent in the social, political, and economic sense? Use examples from the text to support your answer.
* How would you characterize the modes of sexuality in this novel? How do we see identity being “queered” or “troubled” in this novel? Use examples from the text to explain your answer.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

WUTHERING HEIGHTS continued and “Why am I so changed?”: Vampiric Selves and Gothic Doubleness in Wuthering Heights by Lakshmi Krishnan

For next week, read through the rest of Wuthering Heights and Lakshmi Krishnan’s essay “Why am I so changed?”: Vampiric Selves and Gothic Doubleness in Wuthering Heights.”

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) Krishnan opens her essay with a discussion of the literary gothic. Do some independent research on this term and explain how it might apply to Wuthering Heights using examples from the text to defend your answer. Take some time to also explain how Krishnan uses this term in her essay. In what ways does she frame WH as a gothic novel and do you agree with her assessment?

2) Krishnan writes:

If we conceive of death signifying ultimate understanding, and life as an enigmatic riddle, then vampires stand at the threshold between incomprehension and ultimate knowledge. They serve as a weighty metaphor for the individual self, poised on the brink – either of discovery or dissolution – at a time when internal forces threatened it as much as external ones. The vampire is a poignant symbol for an era obsessed with defining the self, with demarcating boundaries between the “Ich” and “Nicht ich,” while simultaneously realizing that these margins were more indistinct than previously hoped. (4)

What do you think Krishnan means by this statement? Given our reading of Polidori’s The Vampyre and WH, in what ways do we see a pervasive dualism in both texts? How do both of these texts serve as explorations in the nature of the “self”? Can we read Lord Aubrey’s physical and mental deterioration in similar moments in WH?

3) Last week, many student bloggers explored the narrative properties of WH and examined how the novel changed according to who was telling the story. For this blog, rewrite a key scene from WH but tell it from another character’s point of view.

4) Krishnan acts us to read WH as a kind of vampire novel. Do you think her argument is convincing? Why or why not? Does WH belong in a class about the vampire, in your opinion? Use examples from the essay and the novel to support your position.

5) Read through the excerpt below from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England:

Book the First : Chapter the Fifteenth : Of Husband and Wife pp 431-432
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs
everything; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or
under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during
her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and
wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities that either of them acquire by the
marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For
this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant
would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant
with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and
wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. A woman indeed may be attorney for her
husband; for that implies no separation from, but is rather a representation of, her lord. And a
husband may also bequeath anything to his wife by will; for that cannot take effect till the
coverture is determined by his death. The husband is bound to provide his wife with necessaries
by law, as much as himself; and if she contracts debts for them, he is obliged to pay them: but for
any thing besides necessaries, he is not chargeable. Also if a wife elopes, and lives with another
man, the husband is not chargeable even for necessaries; at last if the person, who furnishes
them, is sufficiently apprized of her elopement. If the wife be indebted before marriage, the
husband is bound afterwards to pay the debt; for he has adopted her and her circumstances
together.
--Blackstone, Sir William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1st Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-1769.

With the reality of English marriage laws in the 19th century in mind, return to the novel and find places where the discussion of “land” and “land inheritance” play a large role in the shaping of characters and events. What role might the transmission of wealth and the shifting of land and inheritance play in the development of the novel in general? What role does it seem to play in the vampire novel?

6) Compare WH with some modern vampire novels, specifically looking at Heathcliff as the “Byronic hero” and comparing him with some contemporary “Byronic” vampires. Use pictures, youtube videos, and fansites to support your comparison.

7) Watch a film version of WH and compare its narrative style to the novel. What sort of licenses does the filmmaker take with the story in his or her adaptation? What changes and why?

8) Finally, for those Twilight fans out there, compare WH to the Bella/Edward obsession. There are many WH references in the Twilight series. Explain what those references are and how we might use a better understanding of WH to "read" the cultural phenomenon that is the Twilight series.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

For next week, read up to page 160 (or Chapter 17) of Wuthering Heights.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

Given our discussion in
Forum B last week, I thought it would serve students best to have more time to formulate their comments on other students' blogs. I hope this will help with the workload and provide you with greater opportunity to develop strong responses to each others' work.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

Here are some questions to get you started on your blogs. Feel free to use them or develop your own. Remember, you can also write a blog responding to another student's post.

1) Read through Rachel’s blog on the Byronic Hero http://brokebibliophile.blogspot.com/2010/09/polidori-and-byronic-heroes.html

and discuss the ways in which we could characterize Heathcliff as a sort of Byronic hero. In what ways is he similar to Lord Ruthven? Include passages from the text to support your answer. In what ways does Heathcliff’s character inform later vampire characters? Make sure to use examples to support your ideas.

2) Compare the descriptions of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. What sort of duality do these two localities represent? Furthermore, how do characters change dependent on their locations in the novel? Draw from specific passages in the novel to support your answer.

3) 1847, the year Bronte wrote her novel, was one of the most calamitous years of the Irish famine or what is now more often called “The Great Hunger.” During this time, England saw an incredible wave of Irish immigration in London, Manchester, and most especially Liverpool. These poor Irish people were most likely sick, emaciated, dirty, spoke Irish Gaelic, and probably seemed to most English people as alien invaders from another planet than human beings and citizens in their so-called “United” Kingdom. During the famine, which killed over a million Irish people, the English government turned a blind eye to Ireland, avoiding the problem rather than working towards providing effective relief. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger by Terry Eagleton, he explains the way in which Ireland figured as England’s “unconscious” (9), and sees Heathcliff as a “fragment of the famine” (11). He writes:


Part of the horror of the Famine is its atavistic nature—the mind-shaking fact that an event with all the premodern character of a medieval pestilence happened in Ireland with frightening recentness. This deathly origin then shatters space as well as time, unmaking the nation and scattering Irish history across the globe. That history will of course continue; but as in Emily Bronte’s novel there is something recalcitrant at its core which defeats articulation, some ‘real’ which stubbornly refuses to be symbolized. In both cases, this ‘real’ is a voracious desire which was beaten back and defeated, which could find no place in the symbolic order of social time and was expunged from it, but which like the shades of Catherine and Heathcliff will return to haunt a history now in the process of regathering its stalled momentum and moving onwards and upwards. Some primordial trauma has taken place, which fixates your development at one level even as you continue to unfold at another, so that time in Irish history and Wuthering Heights would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously. Something anyway, for good or ill, has been irrevocably lost; and in both Ireland and the novel it takes up its home on the alternative side of myth. (14-15)


Explain what you think Eagleton means in the passage above. What do you think of Heathcliff as a “fragment” of the Famine, or as a colonial “Other”? How do he and Catherine “haunt” history? What does that mean? Eagleton says that that time in Irish history and Wuthering Heights “would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously.” Where do you see evidence of this in the novel? What does Eagleton mean by the very last statement? How do these characters’ lives become the embodiment of myth? Who (or what?) is lost to “myth”?

4) How do Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean influence the story as narrators? Do you think they are completely reliable observers? How do they perceive the events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange? Use examples from the text to support your answer.

5) How would you characterize the novel’s female characters? Do you find these female characters sympathetic? Are they victims of the patriarchal forces around them or are they simply the harbingers of their own self-destruction? Use examples to support your answer.

6) Read through these contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/contemp_rev.html

How would you characterize these reviews? What do these reviews say about the times in which Emily Brontë published her novel and the reading public at large? Do you think we modern readers see this novel differently, or do some of these criticisms still hold true to you today? Explain your answer using the novel for support of your claims.

Friday, September 3, 2010

THE VAMPYRE by John Polidori

The Vampyre Blog Questions

For next week, read Polidori’s The Vampyre” and Nina Auerbach’s “Giving Up the Ghost” from her seminal book Our Vampires, Ourselves (located on D2L).

The following are some discussion questions to get you started. You do NOT have to use them, but feel free to draw from them for inspiration. In addition to using these questions, you could also respond to another student's blog. Make sure to provide links to these blogs and to any outside sources.

Your blogs plus two comments are due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Lord Byron, largely the inspiration behind Polidori’s The Vampyre, was once described by his jilted lover Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” For this blog, do some background research on Lord Byron and explore how and why his persona became the vampire prototype that still haunts contemporary representations. You should look up the term “Byronic hero” as that concept will come to inform the development of many later vampire characters. You might also want to do some background research on Polidori himself and of the particular nature of the relationship between him and Lord Byron. You could also do some research on that faithful night in Lake Geneva that produced such great gothic masterpieces as The Vampyre and Frankenstein. Polidori, Byron, Shelly, Mary Shelly (then Godwin), and her sister were once dubbed as “The Satanic School.” Do some research on this unique group of literary misfits and share what you find with the class. Were these young writers the original “Goth kids”?

How would you characterize what we might term “high society” in this story? In what ways is Lord Ruthven, and indeed the vampire figure as a whole, a response to this particular culture?

Why might it be significant that Lord Ruthven comes from “The East” and seems grounded in that culture? How is “The East” juxtaposed with what might be termed “The West” in this story?

How does this story imagine femininity and womanhood? Why is the vampire figure significant to this representation?

On page 14 Auerbach quotes from Eve Sedgwick, using her term “paranoid Gothic.” In Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick uses Frankenstein to define this term, which is also sometimes known as “homosexual panic.” As in Polidori’s The Vampyre, these texts contain

"A residue of two potent male figures locked in an epistemologically indissoluble clench of will and desire—through these means, the paranoid Gothic powerfully signified, at the very moment of crystallization of the modern, capitalism-marked oedipal family, the inextricability from that formation of a strangling double bind in male homosocial constitution. Put another way, the usefulness of Freud’s formulation…that paranoia in men results from the repression of their homosexual desire, has nothing to do with a classification of the paranoid Gothic in terms of ‘latent’ or ‘overt’ ‘homosexual’ ‘types,’ but everything to do with the foregrounding, under the specific, foundational historic conditions of the early Gothic, of intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds." (187)

Unpack this quote for the class and attempt to explain what you think Sedgwick is saying about the paranoid Gothic. Given what Sedgwick and Auerbach are saying about homosexual panic and the nineteenth-century novel, how might we understand Polidori’s story as an example of the paranoid Gothic? How might we understand this all-important “oath”? What might the “oath” be symbolic of in the story?

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Blog Assignment EDIT

Hi Students,

I forgot to mention on the blog assignment that I would like for you to check out and comment on other students' blogs. You can find links to student blogs on the tab above that says, you guessed it, "links to student blogs." Not everyone has turned in their sheets, so we only have a handful of student blogs so far, but the list will continue to grow in the next couple of days.

Since I dropped the ball on this aspect of the assignment, I will make it optional for THIS week, but please take some time to familiarize yourself with each others' blogs and comment if you have a chance. There's some really funny stuff out there! Also, make sure you're "following" each other as it will make it easier to stay connected on what other students are writing about throughout the course.

I'll be reading your work and commenting on your blogs later this week, so stay tuned.

I hope everyone is managing the new technologies okay. Please email me or utilize the help forum if you get totally lost.

Happy blogging!

Colleen

Monday, August 23, 2010

First Assignment

Welcome to English 263: The Vampire Novel!

Every week, I will post a few questions on here to get you thinking about your own blogs. For our first week of class, we have quite a bit of house-keeping to do, so please be patient with the new technology and the various assignments. Below is your first introductory assignment. Please read through it carefully. If you have any questions, feel free to post them on the Help forum. Happy blogging!

Your First Blog:

Write a brief paragraph that will introduce yourself to your fellow bloggers. Below are some questions to get you started, but feel free to write what you think will best represent you.

Give us at least three interesting facts about yourself. Explain why you signed up for the course and what you hope to get out of it (please refrain from just saying it fulfills a GER credit. That’s pretty obvious). Discuss what is your favorite novel and why? (If you do not have a favorite novel, describe a movie that you particularly like). What certain kinds of books do you find yourself drawn to and why? What are your expectations of a novel? In other words, when you open a book, what do you generally hope to get out of it? You might also want to explore what is your personal history with English classes? What sort of English classes have you taken and what sort of literature have you read? How do you think this online literature class might be different from other literature classes you have taken? What sort of perspective or point of view are you bringing to this class? In other words, what do you already know about vampires, vampire literature, and literature in general? If you don’t have any background in these things, what about your background will help contribute to our online discussion? What sort of online communities do you belong to already? (i.e. facebook, chat forums, etc. do you already keep a blog?). What’s your experience with online communication? Has it been positive? Negative? What do you find works best in an online community?

The following questions are just to get you familiar with some of the functions blogger has to offer. If you get stuck, do a search for answers or post a question to the help forum on my blog.

Post a picture of a place you’ve been or a place you’d like to visit. Explain why. (Let’s keep these next few things somewhat PG-13, please).

Post a link to a website you tend to frequent. Explain why you like it.

Post a youtube video that you like or you think is particularly interesting. Explain why you like this video.

Post *something* (a link, a photo, a youtube video, etc) of one of your favorite vampire characters. Explain why you like this character and what attracts you to him or her (or it!).

Discussion Assignment:

By Friday at 11:59 pm, make sure you visit the chat forums for the course. Remember that participation in the chat forums is mandatory, but there is no requirement of length or frequency of posting. Posting to the chat forums is like participating in class. You will be graded holistically by the quality and frequency of your posts, the depth of your analysis, your attentiveness to other students’ ideas, and your enthusiasm and engagement in discussions.