Course outline

Bibliography

Past exam questions

SLL3001F: Sex from Sappho to Cyber 2010

DUE DATE: Friday 7th May 2010.

Essays should be handed in to the SLL 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 (net.sex and sex-blogging) and fan fiction.
  • All extensions for this course should be arranged with Terry Davies, 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.

UNREAL SEX ESSAY TOPIC 2010
The vampire and erotic fantasy

BUFFY: See, this is what I hate about you vampires. Sex and death and love and pain, it's all the same damned thing to you.
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 7, "Conversations with Dead People").
If the vampire is a symbol of "sex and death and love and pain", why is this an attractive equation? With close analysis of key details from your chosen text, show how the vampire is a figure of both eroticism and violence, and suggest why this conflation is made in this particular text given its time and place of production.

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, other than in passing for purposes of comparison. 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.

Return to Unreal Sex page.