ENGL 200 E: Vampires in Literature
The scholar Nina Auerbach once wrote, “Every age invents the vampire it needs.” In premodern European communities, the folkloric vampire was a real, literal answer to unexplainable questions: why do otherwise healthy people waste away and die? Why do some people take more communal resources than is their fair share?
The modern literary vampire – which will be our focus – has become one of our most potent symbols of horror, capable of creating altered, heightened psychological states in victims and readers alike. But the vampire is also a figure who can explain big ideas. Indeed, Karl Marx memorably described the capitalist world system as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In this course, we will read and discuss vampire fiction that is beautifully made and treats topics including gender, race, queerness, technology, and imperialism. And things that go bump in the night.
Required textbooks (buy all 3 of these exact editions at the beginning of the quarter):
- Octavia Butler, Fledgling (Seven Stories Press, ISBN 9781644211298, $27.95)
- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (Lanternfish Press, edited by Carmen Maria Machado, ISBN 9781941360385, $17)
- Bram Stoker, Dracula (Second Norton Critical Edition, edited by David J. Skal and John Edgar Browning, ISBN 9780393441819, $24)