Seminar on Victorian Literature: Studies of the Vampire Fiction
Spring 2009
(A Tentative Syllabus)
Teacher: 林明澤
Classroom: 修齊大樓 26510 室
Office: 修齊大樓 26640 室
Phone number: 2757575 ext. 52248
E-mail Address: linmt@mail.ncku.edu.tw.
II. Class Hours:
09:10~12:00 on every Wednesday
III. Description of the Course:
This course aims to introduce the motif of vampire in European
culture; it traces how the motif was salvaged from East European folklore
and developed/transformed in the nineteenth-century literature until the
beginning of the twentieth century. Another, no less appropriate title for
the course would be “Vampire until Dracula” because its main concern is
to reshape students’ understanding of the vampire as a cultural icon.
After all, their impressions about the figure have been dominated by
his/her modern, excessively romanticized and eroticized, rendering in
popular culture (Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and their cinematic
derivatives are salient examples); even the students’ understanding of
Count Dracula is probably not faithful to his novelistic original but is
based on reductive representations of him in all sorts of cultural products.
Therefore, through a bunch of representative texts drawn from diverse
disciplines, this course intends to lead the students from the vampire’s
emergence out of East European folklore, through his/her debut in the
European literary scenes (first in poetry, then in fiction), as well as his/her
evolution as a carrier of many different cultural significances in the 19th
century, and end up with his/her best known avatar in Count Dracula.
Although it may not be very uncommon in the graduate program of an
English department outside Taiwan, this course is still highly experimental
in design for me, for some of the texts are not from the familiar disciplines
like literary criticism and most of them are not major, well-known literary
texts (which means that I cannot rely on much ready source of criticism to
help us analyze these texts). Besides, I cannot say that I have an
adequate command of the texts because I have read most of them only
once without really looking into the issues and questions they bring up.
Although I know I cannot be very wishful, my ideal students for this
course are those who have sufficient knowledge of the 19th-century
I.
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European culture, so I can read and discuss these texts along with them;
that is why I originally set the maximum admission number as 15
people—a limit which the school registration system failed to enforce for
me. Students who take the course and expect to keep silence while
simply listening to my speech-like lectures (as I often did in my courses)
will probably be disappointed; instead, I expect more active participation
in class discussion and I am generally impatient with pointless responses
from students. You are strongly advised to take these conditions into
consideration before you decide to stick to your former selection of the
course out of ill-informed motives.
IV. Class Schedule:
Feb. 18th
Introduction to the Course
A General Overview
Feb. 25th
Christopher Frayling, “Lord Byron to Count Dracula”
Folkloric and Forensic Vampire
Mar. 4th
Felix Oinas, “East European Vampires” (Surreal)
Paul Barber, “Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire” (Peter)
John V. A. Fine, Jr. “In Defense of Vampires” (Surreal)
Psychoanalytic Vampire
Mar. 11th
Ernest Jones, “The Vampire” in On the Nightmare (David)
James Twitchell, “The Vampire Myth” (Jeremy)
Early Poetic Vampire
Mar. 18th
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Bride of Corinth” (Billy)
Bürger, “Lenora” (Billy)
John Stagg, “The Vampyre” (Billy)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel” (Belinda)
John Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Surreal)
Jonas Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros” (David)
Elizabeth M. Liggins, “Folklore and the Supernatural in ‘Christabel’”
(Surreal)
Ruthvon and His Descendants
Mar. 25th
John Polidori, “The Vampyre” (Marcy)
Lord George G. Byron, “Fragment of a Story” (Justin)
Anonymous, “The Bride of the Isles” (Claire)
Mair Rigby, “‘Prey to some cureless disquiet’” (Justin)
(Holiday)
Romantic Vampire
Apr. 1st
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Apr. 8th
Johann Ludwig Tieck, “Wake Not The Dead” (Jo)
Théophile Gautier, “The Dead Leman (La Morte Amoureuse)”
(Cheer)
Anonymous, “The Mysterious Stranger” (Ingrid)
James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampire (excerpt, along with
James Twitchell’s plot summary) (Billy)
Nina Auerbach, “Varney’s Moon” in Our Vampires, Ourselves (Billy)
Stage Vampire
Apr. 15th
J. R. Planché, The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles! (Jo)
Alexander Dumas, “A Visit to the Theatre” (Patty)
W. T. Moncrieff, The Spectre Bridegroom (David)
Vampire as Social Other
Apr. 22th
E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Aurelia” (Lance)
Sabine Baring-Gould, “A Dead Finger”
F. Marion Crawford, “For the Blood Is the Life”
Mary E. Braddon, “Good Lady Ducayne”
Vampire as Ethnic/Racial Other
Apr. 29th
Alexis Tolstoy, “The Family of the Vourdalak”
X. L., “A Kiss of Judas”
Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Fate of Madame Cabanel”
Edward Lucas White, “Amina”
Lesbian/Incestuous Vampire
May 6th
Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla”
Arthur H. Nethercot, “Coleridge's ‘Christabel’ and Lefanu's
‘Carmilla’”
May 13th
Raymond T. McNally, “In Search of the Lesbian Vampire”
William Veeder, “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression”
Angelica Michelis, “‘Dirty Mamma’: Horror, Vampires, and the
Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction”
Ambrose Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Fraser”
RESPONSE PAPER DUE
Psychological Vampire
May 20th
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Parasite”
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, “Luella Miller”
Algernon Blackwood, “The Transfer”
Artistic Vampire
May 27th
Mary Cholmondeley, “Let Loose”
Julian Hawthorne, “Ken’s Mystery”
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Hume Nisbet, “The Old Portrait”
Princely Vampire
rd
June 3
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Patrick Johnson, “Count Dracula and the Folkloric Vampire: Thirteen
Comparisons”
Benson Saler & Charles A. Ziegler, “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters
and the Mind”
June 10th
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’”
June 17th
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Franco Moretti, “Dracula and Capitalism”
Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media”
June 26th
FINAL PAPER DUE
V. Teaching Materials:
This syllabus in its present, tentative form is structured around a gregarious
collection of more than forty texts, which are of diverse natures such as survey of
literary history, short story, novelette, poetry, theatre play, journal, critical essay,
etc. Although many of these texts are not easily available in hardcopy form,
fortunately for about half of them I have digital copies, which I have downloaded
free either from websites featuring vampire literature or from the electronic
database resources provided by the school library. For example, most of the
short stories I include here come from the website called “Horror Masters” (the
link for vampire stories is http://www.horrormasters.com/Themes/vampires.htm).
I can pass the digital copies of many of the texts to you for you to print out your
own hardcopies. You may still need to photocopy some other texts, which are
not many, and the master copies will be given to you, two or three weeks before
they are discussed in class, for you to make your own copies. The only text you
need to buy, the Oxford Edition of Dracula, I already asked the Kaoshiung
Branch of Bookman Bookstore (高雄書林書局 (07) 229-0300) to reserve 15
copies of the book for the course. Contact a lady called 陳心怡 and order the
copies you need as a group to get a discount.
There are several reasons why I do not print out all the required texts and
have them bound into a volume in advance (a copy of which then you can simply
buy from a photocopy shop) though this is the common practice. One primary
reason is that I did not decide which texts to be included in the syllabus until
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very late, so I did not have time to prepare the texts in this way.
Besides, such a
volume of course materials is often bulky and unwieldy; the texts may be more
securely preserved for future use, but the volume cannot be easily carried around.
Another more important reason is that, by doling out the texts piecemeal, I keep
the syllabus open for possible future changes: in responses to such factors as
time restriction, the students’ reception, schedule conflict, etc., some texts may
be replaced by others or simply removed from the syllabus. I believe that it
should save time and money if the texts are offered to you in this piecemeal way.
VI. Class Activities:
1. Each week two or three students are required to do oral presentations on the texts;
each presentation will take no more than 15 minutes. The oral presentations will
be followed by a general discussion among the students and the teacher.
2. I will have a course webpage set up on the school’s Internet teaching platform,
Blackboard (http://bb.ncku.edu.tw/ ). Oral report outlines and PowerPoint files
prepared by both you and me will be posted on the webpage. A forum is also set
up on the website, and each student is encouraged to join general discussion. You
are welcomed to come up there to start or join discussion threads related to
course work; I will hang around, too, reading your discussion or even joining it.
VII. Requirements:
1. Each student is required to do two oral presentations on the course materials; for
each presentation a student may have to cover more than one text while two
students may be responsible for one text, depending on the length of the text. The
presenter should prepare a copy of the presentation outline for each participant or
a PowerPoint file for me to put on the course webpage. If the text concerned is
literary fiction in nature, the presenter should not simply give a plot summary;
instead, themes, issues, or questions should be brought up to stimulate further
discussion. Since we don’t have much time for each session, the presenter should
limit the time within 15 minutes. Don’t fall into trivial details when preparing the
outline or the PowerPoint file; important details will come up during the following
discussion.
2. Each student is required to write one response papers (5 pages for Ph.D. and 3 for
M.A. students) on a theme or issue of the 19th-century vampire discourse, chosen
by him/herself. This paper does not need to be documented (i.e. with such
scholarly appendages as quotations, notes, bibliography, etc.), but it should focus
on and develop a single issue or idea. DON’T just write down your general
impressions about several stories or an issue. Writing the response paper will help
you generate ideas for your final term paper.
3. The final paper in due on June 26th. It should be around 15 pages long for the
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Ph.D. and 10 pages long for the M.A. students (“Works Cited” included),
following the latest MLA style (i.e. one-inch margin, 1.5-space between lines,
Times New Roman No.12 font, foot-note format, etc.) The paper will be corrected,
graded, and returned to you after the summer break. You can develop your
response paper into this final paper, but DON’T just copy long passages from the
former into the later. Besides, all the appendages to an academic paper (title,
footnotes, etc.) are required.
4. Plagiarism is a highly offensive crime in the academic world, so be careful with
your quotations and documentations. Flagrant violations of related regulations will
certainly leave me no choice but to fail you in this course. Besides, as you will see
when I return your response paper graded and corrected, I care a lot about my
students’ writing ability, and I firmly demand clarity and correctness in your
papers. If you are not sure about the quality of your papers, find a copyeditor to
fix any possible problems and errors before you turn them in. If I simply cannot
understand your arguments because of these problems in your papers, I will not
grade them until you have revise them and make them readable.
5. As you are all graduate students, it becomes impolite of me to demand your class
attendance. However, if you are found absent quite often, you still may not be able
to get the kind of grade you expect—even though you do your oral presentations
and turn in your papers as required.
VIII.
Evaluation:
Oral presentation 20%, Class discussion 20%: short response paper 20%; long
term paper 40%
IX. Bibliography:
This bibliography lists only items that are to be used as teaching materials. I have all
of them and am ready to share them with you.
Auerbach, Nina. “Varney’s Moon.” Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995. 27-38. [Available in our library]
Barber, Paul. “Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire.” Dundes 109-42.
Baring-Gould, Sabine. “A Dead Finger.” The Book of Were-Wolves. 1865. Horror
Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009. <www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0567.pdf>
[Available as digital copy]
Bierce, Ambrose. “The Death of Halpin Fraser.” 1893. [Available as digital copy]
Blackwood, Algernon. “The Transfer.” 1912. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb.
2009. <http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0232.pdf>
Braddon, Mary E. “Good Lady Ducayne.” 1896. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19
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Feb. 2009. <www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0557.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
“The Bride of the Isles.” 1820. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009
<www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1176.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
Bürger, Gottfried. “Lenora.” 1773. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009
<www.horrormasters.com/Text/a_308.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
Byron, George G. “Fragment of a Story.” Frayling 126-30.
Byron, Glennis, ed. Dracula: Bram Stoker. New Casebooks Series. London:
Macmillan, 1999.
Cholmondeley, Mary. “Let Loose.” 1890. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb.
2009. <http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0435.pdf> [Available as digital
copy]
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Christabel.” 1797. Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2000. 441-58.
Collins, Margo, ed. Before the Count: British Vampire Tales, 1732-1897. Zittaw, 2007.
Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.” Byron 93-118.
Crawford, F. Marion. “For the Blood Is the Life.” 1911. The Literary Gothic. 10 Jan.
2009. 19 Feb. 2009. <www.litgothic.com/Texts/blood_is_the_life.html>
[Available as digital copy]
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Parasite.” 1894. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb.
2009. <http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0556.pdf>
Dumas, Alexandre. “A Visit to the Theatre.” Frayling 131-44.
Dundes, Alan, ed. The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P,
1998. [Available in our library]
Fanu, Sheridan Le. “Carmilla.” 1872. Best Ghost Stories of J. S. LeFanu. New York:
Dover, 1964. 274-339. Gutenberg Project. 19 Jan. 2009. 20 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10007> [Available as digital copy]
Fine, John V. A. Jr. “In Defense of Vampires.” Dundes 57-66
Frayling, Christopher, ed. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber
and Faber, 1991. [A copy kept by me]
Gautier, Théophile. “The Dead Leman (La Morte Amoureuse).” 1836. Horror
Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0324.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “The Bride of Corinth.” 1797. Before the Count:
British Vampire Tales 1732-1897. Ed. Margo Collins. Zittaw Press, 2007. 136-42.
[Available as digital copy]
Hawthorne, Julian. “Ken's Mystery.” 1883. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb.
2009. <http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0521.pdf>
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Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Aurelia.” The Serapion Brethren. 1820. Frayling 190-207.
Johnson, Patrick. “Count Dracula and the Folkloric Vampire: Thirteen Comparisons.”
Journal of Dracula Studies 3 (2001). 13 Mar. 2008. 20 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.blooferland.com/drc/images/03Johnson.rtf>
Jones, Ernest. “The Vampire.” On the Nightmare. New York: Grove, 1959. 131-53.
[Available in our library]
Keats, John. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” 1819. Norton Anthology of English
Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2000.
845-47.
Liggins, Elizabeth M. “Folklore and the Supernatural in ‘Christabel.’” Folklore 88.1
(1977): 91-104. [Available as digital copy]
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “The Fate of Madame Cabanel.” 1881. Horror Masters. 27 Jan.
2009. 19 Feb. 2009. <www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0540.pdf> [Available as
digital copy]
McNally, Raymond T. “In Search of the Lesbian Vampire.” Journal of Dracula
Studies 3 (2001). 13 Mar. 2008. 20 Feb. 2009.
<www.blooferland.com/drc/images/03McNally.doc>
Michelis, Angelica. “‘Dirty Mamma’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late
Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction.” Critical Survey 15.3 (2003): 5-22.
[Available as digital copy]
“The Mysterious Stranger.” 1860. The Literary Gothic. 10 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009.
<www.litgothic.com/Texts/mysterious_stranger.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
Moncrieff, W. T. The Spectre Bridegroom. Collins 87-110.
Moretti, Franco. “Dracula and Capitalism.” Byron 43-54.
Nethercot, Arthur H. “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Lefanu’s ‘Carmilla.’” Modern
Philology 47.1 (1949): 32-38. [Available as digital copy]
Nisbet, Hume. “The Old Portrait.” 1900. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009.
<www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0565.pdf>
Oinas, Felix. “East European Vampires.” Dundes
Planché, J. R. The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles. Collins 68-86.
Polidori, John. “The Vampyre.” The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Eds.
Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 3-23. Gutenberg
Project. 19 Jan. 2009. 20 Feb. 2009. <http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6087>
[The book available in our library; a more complete version of the text available
as digital copy]
Rigby, Mair. “‘Prey to some cureless disquiet’: Polidori’s Queer Vampyre at the
Margins of Romanticism.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (formerly
Romanticism on the Net) 36-37 (November 2004): 14 par. Ed. Michael
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Eberle-Sinatra. 3 Feb. 2009. Université de Montréal, Montréal. 19 Feb 2009.
<http://www.erudit.org/revue/RON/2004/v/n36-37/011135ar.html > [Available as
digital copy]
Roth, Phyllis A. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Byron 30-42.
Ryan, Alan. The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Rymer, James Malcolm. Excerpt of Varney the Vampire. Ryan 26-35
Saler, Benson and Charles A. Ziegler. “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the
Mind.” Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005): 218-227. [Available as digital
copy]
Spatz, Jonas. “The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel.’”
PMLA 90.1 (1975): 107-16. [Available as digital copy]
Stagg, John. “The Vampyre.” The Minstrel of the North. 1810. The Literary Gothic.
10 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009. <http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/vampyre.html>
[Available as digital copy]
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Ed. Maud Ellmann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Tieck, Johann Ludwig. “Wake Not The Dead.” 1800. The Minstrel of the North. 1810.
Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009
<http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0320.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
Tolstoy, Alexis. “The Family of the Vourdalak.” 1840. Frayling 253-79.
Twitchell, James. “The Vampire Myth.” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ed.
Margaret Carter. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. 109-16. [Available as
digitally scanned copy]
Veeder, William. “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression.” Nineteenth-Century Gothic: At
Home with the Vampire. Vol. 3 of Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and
Cultural Studies. Ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townshend. 4 vols. London:
Routledge, 2004. [The whole series available in school library]
White, Edward Lucas. “Amina.” 1907. Horror Masters. 27 Jan. 2009. 19 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1163.pdf> [Available as digital copy]
Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media.” ELH 59.2 (1992):
467-93. [Available as digital copy]
Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E. “Luella Miller.” 1903. Ryan 175-87. [a photocopy of
mine]
X.L. “A Kiss of Judas.” 1894. Frayling 221-50
X. Extra Bibliography:
The following items are presented to you because they are frequently referred
to in studies of vampire literature. You may like to consult them for your
further studies.
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