A Taste of My Vampire Lit Seminar
I’m very excited to teach my dream course in the spring—an honors seminar about the vampire in literature. Biting Back: The Subversive Vampire in Literature and Film will use the vampire as a springboard to discuss political, gender, and cultural tensions in a variety of books from the nineteenth-century onwards. Although I’m a British lit professor, the class is interdisciplinary, so I’m leaving several of the projects wide open. This means that if a student is interested in early forensic investigations, she might do a presentation on the influence of the Jack the Ripper investigations on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And, the best part—at the end of the class I’m taking students to London! Woot!
What we’re reading:
Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
(Edited by my brilliant friend and fellow writer, Jamieson Ridenhour)
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Lauren Owens,The Quick
John Marks, Fangland
Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark
Nine Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves
I feel like this current list highlights the touchstone Victorian vampire texts as well as current trends in popular vampire literature. Also, Auerbach provides a solid scholarly framework for class discussions.
What we’re watching?
Episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Flannery O’Connor meets Bram Stoker—SO MUCH to talk about in this series.
Fright Night
The vampire hits suburbia? This film is worth watching just to see a realty sign used as a stake.