DUE DATE: Friday 16th May.
Essays should be handed in to the MCL department office (Beattie building) before 12.00 noon.
- The essay question for this section is set on the vampire lectures, and there will not be an exam question on the vampire material. The exam will offer a choice between Internet sexuality (chatrooms, e-mail, MUDs) and fan fiction.
- All extensions for this course should be arranged with Sonja de Kock, in the SLL department office, and essays should also be handed in to her office.
- This section of the course involves a lot of Internet material. Internet references in your bibliographies MUST include the FULL URL of the specific article (not just the URL of the home page), the title of the article or page, and the date on which you accessed it. Where possible, the author’s name and the copyright date of the material must also be included.
- Please make sure that URLs are correctly typed (I suggest you cut-and-paste from your browser). Chasing up URLs which only give error messages because they’re wrong, really annoys me and causes essays to mysteriously lose marks.
- Please also make sure that you clearly reference any primary texts you use (vampire literature/media), since there are not actual set works for this course.
- Resist the temptation to steal your ideas from a website; (a) these are generally poor quality and will not gain you good marks, (b) I’m much more interested in your analysis than in your ability to synthesise outside sources, and (c) plagiarism really annoys me.
- I will not under any circumstances tolerate plagiarism at third-year level; students detected in plagiarism will be sent to the University Court.
The vampire and erotic fantasy
Pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements. In its most basic form, these elements are represented by the probe and the fringed hole, the twin signs of male and female in graffiti… (Angela Carter).
With detailed analysis of specific scenes from one vampire text of your choice (novel, short story, film, TV series, poetry, etc), discuss the figure of the vampire as a representation of sexuality in terms of the above quote.
You should illustrate your answer with detailed reference to a specific vampire text, in literature, film or any other medium. If choosing a lengthy text (novel, TV series), you should focus your analysis on specific extracts or episodes, and should offer some close reading.
NB you may NOT cover the Carter, Stoker or Lefanu extracts we dealt with in class discussions, i.e. the ones in your course reader. I don’t mind if you use Dracula or Carmilla as long as you choose different extracts for analysis.
Essay length should be 1800-2000 words.