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.
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. (Whole Preface 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.
Robert Rawdon Wilson (1990) "SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Postmodern Nexus" in Past the Last Post: Theorising Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism ed. Adam and Tiffin. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. (Analysis of "Lady of the House of Love"; whole book is on Short Loan)
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.
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". Slightly fragmentary accounts of the classic Victorian gentlemanly vampire.Poetry: Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". The classic 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.
An excellent collection, if you can find a copy, is Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula.Modern fantasy
Poppy Z. Brite, . Pretty, lost, ambivalent goth-boys eat each other. Good on adolescent angst and eroticism; high on blood.
Tanith Lee, "Red as Blood", the title story to her fairytale collection Red as Blood; Snow White re-written as a vampire femme fatale. Dark, sexy and inverted. Red As Blood is on Short Loan, you can copy the story from 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.
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.
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.
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 movie in many ways: 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). 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. 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.
SEXUALITY AND THE INTERNET
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.
Pavel Curtis (1997) "MUDding: Social phenomena in text-based virtual realities" in Culture of the Internet, ed. Sara Kiesler. Mahwah: Lawrence Eribaum.
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.
Laura Miller (1995) "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier" in Resisting the Virtual Life, ed. Brook and Boal. San Francisco: City Lights.
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.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/ Alan Sondheim’s personal reflections on Net culture and subjectivity. Some interesting stuff (expands on his articles in Being Online, above).
Tyler Stevens (1996). "’Sinister Fruitiness’: Neuromancer, internet sexuality and the Turing test." Studies in the Novel 28(3), Fall 1996. (photocopy)
Sherry Turkle (1997) "Constructions and reconstructions of self in virtual reality: playing in the MUDs" in Culture of the Internet, ed. Sara Kiesler. Mahwah: Lawrence Eribaum.
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.
INTERNET CHAT
http://www.new2chat.com/ircintro.html. Basic introduction to IRC 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.
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.geocities.com/Hollywood/3142/fanficart.htm
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.
Really Awful Fanfic, a site which summarises, reviews and basically shreds the most egregious examples of bad fanfic writing they can find. http://www.godawful.net/index.htm. Warning: some of the quotes may make your eyes bleed.
"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.
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 fanfics.
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.subreality.com/marysue/gsblolfc.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.
