Vamps and Vampires
Maud Ellmann
Why are European artists and writers of the 1890s obsessed with vampires? How does vampirism come to represent the anxieties characteristic of modernity? In particular, what does the vampire have to do with changing images of women – the vamp, the New Woman, the Suffragette, the lesbian, the hysteric, the typist – and with changing images of men – the shell-shocked veteran, the “invert,” the obsessive compulsive? What is the relation between imaginary vampires and real empires, both striving for world-domination at the turn of the century? This course addresses these and other questions about vampires in Anglophone and European literature and art from the 1880s to the 1920s. Day 1 focuses on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the proliferation of vampire-metaphors in the period, ranging from Guy de Maupassant to Karl Marx. Day 2 compares literary to visual representations of the vampire.
Many thanks to Notre Dame for sponsoring and organizing this wonderful opportunity for teachers.
I will carry the use of power point, combined with critical questions being asked and answered into my classroom.
I greatly appreciated the diverse disciplines intertwined with the study. I like the mixture of literature, art, and discussion.
| Maud Ellmann holds the Keough Professorship at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. She is the editor of World’s Classics edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and has published widely on Anglo-Irish literature, modernism, gender studies, and literary theory. Her books include The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment and Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crashay Prize in 2004. |