Past exam questions

SLL3001F: Sex from Sappho to Cyber 2010

COURSE READER CONTENTS

Italo Calvino (1982) “Definitions of Territories: Eroticism” in The Literature Machine. London: Secker and Warburg.

Bram Stoker (1897) Extracts from Dracula. (1983) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sheridan Lefanu (1872) Extracts from Carmilla. (1995) Ware: Wordsworth.

Angela Carter (1979) "The Lady of the House of Love" from The Bloody Chamber. London: Penguin.

Angela Carter (1979) Extracts from "Polemical Preface" to The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago.

Transcript of chat scene from the film Closer.

Sex-blog extracts (Leticia McKenzie, Girl with a One Track Mind, MonMouth, Belle de Jour)

Cassie Claire (2002) "The Very Secret Diary of Saruman the White", http://www.ealasaid.com/misc/vsd/
--- (2004) "Mortal Instruments", which is in your course reader, is no longer available online..

FANTASY AND THE VAMPIRE

CRITICAL TEXTS

Angela Carter (1979) "Polemical Preface" to The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago. (Book is on Short Loan; extract in this reader).

Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (1997) Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Various articles on different vampire texts, many of them film/contemporary.

Rosemary Jackson (1981) Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. Especially chapters 2 and 4.

Talia Schaffer (1994) “A Wilde Desire Took Me: the homoerotic history of Dracula", ELH 61(2), 381-425. On JSTOR.

Rhonda V. Wilcox (2002) "'Every Night I Save You': Buffy, Spike, Sex and Redemption." Slayage 5 (2.1), May 2002. http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage5/wilcox.htm. You may well find other interesting Buffy and Angel articles on Slayage, see here for the archive.

Jules Zanger (1997) "Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door" in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.

VAMPIRE TEXTS

This is a fairly random selection of classic and recent vampire texts in literature and film. These are suggestions, I’m quite happy for you to deal with any vampire text you are familiar with, so your class and exam essays don’t need to stick to texts on this list. If you don’t generally go for vampire stuff, this might give you some starting points. NB: not all of these will necessarily offer good expressions of the themes your essay topic asks you to analyse.

Gothic and Victorian texts

Novels: Bram Stoker, Dracula. Absolutely the novel of Victorian sexual repression, seduction and corruption. Stoker defined the image of the mesmerising aristocratic vampire; his corrupt and eroticised women are particularly interesting.

Short stories: Sheridan LeFanu, "Carmilla". Lesbian undertones (or overtones) to this tale of an innocent girl seduced by a female aristocratic vampire. Now with added giant black cats and obvious anagrams.
Polidori, "The Vampyre"; James Malcom Rymer, "Varney, the Vampyre". Lesser-known accounts of the classic Victorian gentlemanly vampire.

Poetry: Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". The seductress faerie woman who sucks the life from her hapless lovers. Big on imagery and atmosphere.
Coleridge, "Christabel." Strange lady taken into aristocratic castle, seduces daughter of the house. Or not. Incomplete, fragmentary and very weird.
A useful collection, if you can find a copy, is Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula.

Modern fantasy

Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls. Pretty, lost, ambivalent goth-boys eat each other. Good on adolescent angst and eroticism; high on blood.
Neil Gaiman, "Snow, Glass, Apples". Short story with Snow White as vampire; explicitly erotic elements. (Ask me if you'd like to see a copy of this; there's also an online version at http://www.holycow.com/dreaming/stories/snow-glass-apples).
Charlaine Harris, the Sookie Stackhouse series (the True Blood TV series is based on these). Interesting in that the world allows vampires to exist openly, and renders their erotic charge completely explicit. Slightly more restrained and less corrupt than the series.
Tanith Lee, "Red as Blood", the title story to her fairytale collection Red as Blood; Snow White re-written as a vampire femme fatale (what's with the recurrence of this motif?). Dark, sexy and inverted. (Ask me if you'd like to see a copy of this).
Robin McKinley, Sunshine. Original and unusual semi-post-apocalyptic imagining of a world where vampires are taken for granted; the human/vampire relationship at the heart of the story has some interesting symbolic coding. Warning: heroine is a baker, this book will make you hungry.
Stephanie Meyer, the Twilight series. This is a difficult text to choose, not just because it's really badly written, but because Meyer uses the erotic content of the vampire myth only in negative, as part of her abstinence polemic. You could try writing on this, but I don't recommend it.
Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard. Romantic poets, vampires and nephilim, with vampire as poetic muse. A brilliant book.
Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum. Very funny, very acute debunking of the vampire mythology, with lots of parody of its erotic elements.
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, et al. Pulp erotic horror. Somewhat obvious and overstated, but frequently very sexy.
Jody Scott, I, Vampire. Rather off-the-wall feminist text.
Mercedes Lackey, Children of the Night. Wiccan investigator meets various vampires, psychic and classic. Notable in that the sexy French blood-sucking man is the good guy; on the other hand, the psychic vampires are truly nasty.
Scott Westerfeld, Parasite Positive (published in the US as Peeps). Vampirism as virus; this is intelligent, amusing and makes useful points about promiscuity which are probably a good thing in the context of its young-adult readership. Will also teach you more than you ever thought you wanted to know about parasitology.
Other sf/fantasy writers who play with vampire motifs include Storm Constantine, Brian Stableford, Dan Simmons, etc. See extensive bibliography in the back of Blood Read, cited above.

Film and TV

Again, a fairly random selection:

Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). The classic silent/black and white vampire film, featuring the gnomish and taloned kind of vampire. Creepy.

Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi, the ultimate Dracula.

Herzog’s Nosferatu (1978). A remake of Murnau's film, with Klaus Kinski; atmospheric and very sexually charged.

The Hunger (1982). A truly weird little movie, but then, David Bowie... Immortal vampire woman keeps immortal but aged zombie lovers in boxes in the attic. Notable for the explicit eroticisation of the blood as life symbolism, the total absence of fangs, and a very, very cool opening sequence featuring Bauhaus singing "Bela Lugosi's Dead". Hooray for goth in-jokes. Also interesting lesbian vampire scene, to music from "Lakme".

Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987). Rock music and pretty vampire teen boys in leather. Kiefer Sutherland. Some fun play with the rock=sex=vampirism trope.

Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). A vivid visual realisation of Stoker's novel, with emphasis on vampire both as seducer and as beast. The corruption of the female characters is particularly interesting.
Annie Lennox's music video for "Love Song for a Vampire" uses interesting victim/vampire imagery mixed with images from the film.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), and the TV series, and the spin-off series Angel. Vampire as bumpy-featured back-alley rapist, mostly. More interesting are Buffy's relationships with various vampires (Angel, Spike) for their symbolic figuration of the sex=transgression idea. The episode with Dracula (Season 3 opener, IIRC), also plays with seduction motifs.

Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994). Sumptuous and richly textured film based on Anne Rice's rather schlocky novel, although I still don't see Tom Cruise as your classic vampire, somehow. Very strong play with vampirism as sexuality/seduction/obsession, though. A sensuous film.

Blade (1998). Black-clad techno vampires in serious body-armour. Vampire recouped both as hero, with big guns, and as suave corporate villain. A fascinating Oedipal scenario, but not much overt play with erotic motifs. I haven't seen Blade II, or Trinity, but by all accounts they're more of the same.

John Carpenter's Vampires (1998). This movie has no truck with seduction - very violent and bloody film, with a male-bonding buddy-feel which creates some interesting homoerotic subtexts to the vampire slaying.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Odd little film, built around the filming of Murneau's Nosferatu: German impressionist director as psychic vampire? A strong thread of sexual obsession, however.

Dracula 2000 Wes Craven presents, but doesn't direct. Not a bad little B-movie: intelligent and self-aware use of the vampire mythology, interestingly filmed, and with a great deal of focus on seduction, the erotic of the bite, and the obsessive intimacy of the vampire's desire for the chosen female victim. Freaky, intense dream-sequences.

Underworld (2004, plus sequel). Vampires versus werewolves! The cultured and urbane vampires are contrasted with the bestial werewolves, but there are no good guys here. This was interesting for its notion of inhumanity as genetics (and therefore reproduction/sex), and a forbidden erotic relationship at the heart of the conflict.

Van Helsing (2004). Stoker's hero as vigilante. Dreadful film - big, loud, glossy, badly plotted, mediocre special effects, and possibly the most horrifyingly toothy vampires in film history... (their jaws unhinge like snakes). I really like the dance sequence with the mirror, but there's not a lot of seduction in this movie, it's too loud.

True Blood, TV series. Vampires are Out, and everyone wants to have sex with them! Including, of course, being bitten. Interestingly explicit take on the eroticism subtext, rather a charged, corrupt Louisiana vibe.

Twilight (2009): the glittery teen cinema version of the glittery teen books. I do not recommend that you look at these texts, their treatment of the vampire as erotic symbol is mostly about denial of sexuality, and they'll thus be tricky to analyse.

In most cases the books themselves are in Short Loan; if it’s a photocopy, I’ve specified.

INTERNET CULTURE

Katie Argyle and Rob Shields (1996) "Is there a body in the Net?" in Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies ed. Rob Shields. London: Sage.

Brenda Danet, Lucia Rudenberg and Yehudit Rosenbaum-Tamari (1998) "Hmmm … where’s that smoke coming from?: Writing, Play and Performance on Internet Relay Chat" in Network and Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet, ed. Sudweeks, McLaughlin and Rafaeli. Menlo Park: AAAI Press.

Richard C. MacKinnon (1998) "The Social Construction of Rape in Virtual Reality" in Network and Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet, ed. Sudweeks, McLaughlin and Rafaeli. Menlo Park: AAAI Press.

David F. Shaw (1997) "Gay Men and Computer Communication: A Discourse of Sex and Identity in Cyberspace." In Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cyberspace. Ed. Stephen G. Jones. London: Sage.

John Simmons (1995) "Sade and Cyberspace" in Resisting the Virtual Life, ed. Brook and Boal. San Francisco: City Lights.

Alan Sondheim. ed (1996) Being On Line: Net Subjectivity. New York: Lusitania.

http://www.alansondheim.org Alan Sondheim’s personal reflections on Net culture and subjectivity. Warning: (a) this is not in a user-friendly web format, it's a series of files with opaque titles, and (b) it's poetry. You'll have to dig for the items where he's talking particularly about online identity and eroticism, but (c) it's worth it.

Catherine Waldby (1998) "Circuits of Desire: Internet Erotics and the Problem of Bodily Location." Culture & Communication Reading Room, Centre for Research in Culture & Communication, Murdoch University. http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/Circuits3.html.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue2/index.html Play and Performance in Computer-Mediated Communication, special issue of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1(2).

INTERNET CHAT

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue2/bechar.html. "From < Bonehead > to < cLoNehEAd >: nicknames, play and identity on Internet relay chat." Haya Bechar-Israeli, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1(2). You may find other interesting articles in this journal, listed here.

MUDs, MOOs AND MMORPGs

Brady Haran (2003)“Fantasy games 'not for geeks'”, BBC News, http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/2939175.stm

http://www.mudconnect.com/mudfaq/mudfaq-p1.html MUD-Connect's FAQ list - a good basic introduction to MUDs and MUDding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft. The Wikipedia entries on MMORPGs, Everquest and World of Warcraft.

http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/staffblog/052009/6090_Girls-in-MMOs Girls in MMOs: a collection of comments from female gamers in World of Warcraft and others. Interesting points made about demographics and stereotyping. Contains sarcasm.

SEX-BLOGGING

NB in the cases of all the personal blogs, I suggest you go back to the beginning of the archive and read forward as several of them change character dramatically over time.

Personal sexual experiences:

Girl with a One Track Mind http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/: frank and unashamed confessions of a woman who enjoys a lot of sex.
"Outed", http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/2006/08/outed.html, Sunday August 6 2006.
"Response", http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/2006/08/response.html, Friday August 11 2006.
"Outcome", http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/2006/08/outcome.html, Tuesday August 15 2006
"By day she worked on Harry Potter. But by night ..." The Sunday Times, August 6, 2006 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article601445.ece The Times article outing the Girl's true identity.
"I don't write to titillate. I censor like crazy to make my blogs less erotic". The Guardian, Friday 11 August 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/11/gender.booksonhealthInterview with the Girl herself, following the revelation of her identity.

Letitia McKenzie: On the cusp of adulthood in America.http://leticiamckenzie.blogspot.com/. A seventeen-year-old schoolgirl talking about fantasy and masturbation.

Pansexual Sodomite: A Genetic Male Pansexual Polyfetishist in Durham, NC : Richard Evans Lee. a href="http://www.pansexualsodomite.org/. Interesting in its analytic approach to gay sexuality, fantasy, etc.

Bitchy Jones: the dominatrix cursed with a soul. http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/. A reflective blog about life as a self-confessed sadist; strong feminist slant.

Prostitutes' sex blogs:

http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com. High-class London call-girl blogs her experiences with clients, earns six-figure book deal.
"Named: The Belle de Jour of the Net", http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article438397.ece, The Sunday Times, March 27 2005.
"Internet 'call-girl author' unmasked", The Times, March 18 2004

Monmouth: the Rent Boy Diaries. http://monmouth.blogspot.com/.
"Beginners' guide to the rent-boy diaries", http://monmouth.blogspot.com/2005/03/beginnerss-guide-to-rentboy-diaries.html, Thursday, March 24, 2005
"The Joy of Cash", http://monmouth.blogspot.com/2004/12/joy-of-cash.html, Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Pussy Talk: DirtyTalkin'Girl. http://nicebluejournal.livejournal.com/. Interested equally in sex and writing; contrasts sex with the persona's husband to sex with her lover.

Sex blogs as information digest:

Violet Blue: Open Source Sex. http://www.tinynibbles.com/index.php. Internet personality, net freedom advocate and sex-blogger.

Eros Blog: Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality. http://www.erosblog.com/. Rather a historical approach to the erotic; lots of pictures.

FAN FICTION THEORY

Kristina Busse (2006) "I'm Jealous of the Fake Me: Postmodern Subjectivity and Identity Construction in Boy Band Fiction." Framing celebrity: new directions in celebrity culture. Ed. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond. London, New York: Routledge.

Henry Jenkins (1992) " 'Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk': Slash and the Fan-Writing Community", In Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. (in SL photocopy cabinets)

Amy Harmon (1997) “In Dull TV Days, Favorites Take Wing Online”, New York Times, August 18 1997. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/18/business/in-tv-s-dull-summer-days-plots-take-wing-on-the-net.html

http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2002/11/01/1036027033529.html. Jon Casimir (2002), “For the love of...”

http://firefox.org/news/articles/650/1/Dr-Merlin039s-Guide-to-Fanfiction/Page1.html: Dr. Merlin's Guide to Fan Fiction. Aimed at fanfic writers, but informative and entertaining.

http://www.fictionalley.org/primer/ The Harry Potter fanfic guide – I recommend the Common Abbreviations list for the confused, and their very good description of a Mary Sue and of the slash phenomenon in the particular Harry Potter context.

http://www.merrycoz.org/papers/MARYSUE.HTM. Pat Pflieger, "Too Good To Be True: 150 years of Mary Sue"

http://www.josephpalmer.com/fanime/. Joseph Palmer, "Fanime 2004 Resources".

http://ljconstantine.com/writing.htm Scroll down to the series of links to fanfic essays - some interesting stuff here.

http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/rre/msg00012.html Henry Jenkins, "The Poachers and the Stormtroopers." Paper on the cultural and sociological implications of fan fiction, by a professor of media/communications at MIT. I recommend this!

Henry Jenkins, "Everybody Loves Harry", post to his blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/everybody_loves_harry.html. This discussion of a recent Harry Potter conference gives useful background to the fandom.

Topless Robot's 10 Most Face-Meltingly Awful Fan Fictions. Please look on this as a cautionary tale. Apart from being hilarious in a dreadful sort of way, it'll make your eyes bleed. http://www.toplessrobot.com/2010/01/tr_special_the_10_most_face-meltingly_awful_fan_fi.php.

"Fanfic: Force of Nature." Extremely interesting discussion of the legal and aesthetic implications of fanfic, on Patrick and Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Making Light blog. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html.

"The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism", by Jonathan Lethem: a reflection on literary borrowing. http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387.

"Star Trek, Darkover, Thunderbirds, and Fan Fiction: An Interview With Joan Marie Verba (Part One)", on Henry Jenkins's media culture blog, http://henryjenkins.org/2010/05/_httpwwwjoanmarieverbacom_your.html . Interesting discussion on the pre-Internet origins of fandom.

FAN FICTION LINKS

There is a lot of fanfic out there, and I really don’t mind which kind you choose to read – don’t feel obliged to stick to the examples I give. I suggest you try Fanfiction.net first; if nothing there interests you, try a Google search for fanfic + text of your choice (book, film, TV series, comic are the common ones, but you can, believe it or not, find World Wrestling Federation fanfic...). Be prepared to do a lot of skim reading to find the less agonising writers, not all of them are necessarily actually acquainted with the English language.

http://www.fanfiction.net/ Fanfiction site: arranged by category. Pretty much anything you can think of, this is a huge site. Did you know people wrote A-Team fanfic…? A lot of this is terrible, you’ll have to do some browsing.

http://www.fictionalley.org Harry Potter fanfic. Schnoogle is novel-length, Astronomy Tower is romance, Riddiklus is comedy, Dark Arts is angsty. Generally higher quality than Fanfiction.net.

http://fan.theonering.net/writing/index.html Lord of the Rings fanfic – rather a lot of parody, you’ll have to dig for the serious stuff. You’ll find actor fanfic here, whereas fanfiction.net and the dedicated sites tend to ban it.

http://fluky.gossamer.org/ X-Files fanfic.

JUST FOR FUN

http://www.brunching.com/features/geekhierarchy.html The Brunching Shuttlecocks’s Geek Hierarchy. Have a look at the extreme two right-hand columns. Furries. Good lord...

http://www.squidge.org/~peja/lordsofthering/ListOfLoTRFanficClichesAndMarySuedoms.htm: Gil Shalos' BIIIIG List Of LOTR Fanfic Cliches And Mary Sue-Doms. This is very funny.

XKCD's Internet Fantasy Map: a tongue-in-cheek plotting of internet culture, rife with in-jokes.

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