FINAL ESSAY OPTION 2

Final Essay Option 2: The Cultural Fears and Desires the Vampire Embodies

For this essay option, you will write about the cultural fears the vampire represents in either Dracula's Victorian English era or Louis, Lestat, and Claudia's postmodern American era (remember, the book IWTV was written in the 1970s US even though it is "set" earlier).

Your primary source will be either the novel Dracula or the novel IWTV. 

You will also include research from at least two outside sources from the library's databases as support. I recommend researching the history of these times and places and the specific areas you are focusing on. Remember the three critical interpretations of blood in Dracula: you may want to return to that introduction to get some ideas of what to look up. It could be anything from British colonization in the Victorian era, women's rights during that era, psycho-analytic theory/Freud, etc. 

Additionally, you must incorporate your monster thesis notes into the essay at least twice.

Make a claim for how the vampire's specific representation in either the Victorian era with Dracula 

or in the postmodern era with Louis, Lestat, and Claudia reflects specific cultural fears and desires. 

To be very, very clear, you will be choosing to write about either Dracula or Louis, Lestat and Claudia. Not both books/sets of vampires. 

Make sure to use the chart we made in class and focus on one to three specific characteristics (their existential crises, their relationship to religion, their appearance, etc). Then, discuss how those categories represents certain specific cultural fears and desires.

For example, Dracula represents fears such as a fear of women's sexual expression during the Victorian era. He also represents a desire for more free sexual expression. 

Interview's vampires represent a desire for eternal youth and beauty, as well as a desire to know one's meaning and purpose in life in a time when that had been ripped away from people due to the Atomic age crisis and the loss of religious unity.

The essay should be 3-5 pages in length, use proper MLA formatting, and include a Works Cited page that does not count toward the 3-5 page requirement. 

You may also find the chart below to be helpful.

Modernism vs Postmodernism  --The features in the table below are only tendencies, not absolutes. In fact, the tendency to see things in seemingly obvious, binary, contrasting categories is usually associated with modernism. The tendency to dissolve binary categories and expose their arbitrary cultural co-dependency is associated with postmodernism.

DRACULA                                                             INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

Modernism/Modernity	Postmodern/Postmodernity
Master Narratives and Metanarratives of history, culture and national identity; myths of cultural and ethnic orgin.	Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin.
Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explantions in history, science and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything.	Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories.
Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases for unity.	Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ethnic unity.
Master narrative of progress through science and technology.	Skepticism of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions.
Sense of unified, centered self; "individualism," unified identity.	Sense of fragmentation and decentered self; multiple, conflicting identities.
Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family.	Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising.
Hierarchy, order, centralized control.	Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.
Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-State, party).	Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.
Root/Depth tropes. Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier).	Rhizome/surface tropes. Attention to play of surfaces, images, signifiers without concern for "Depth".
Faith in the "real" beyond media and representations; authenticity of "originals"	Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original". "As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.
Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture); imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative	Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture; mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories.
Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing.	Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities.
Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.	Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality. Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.
Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality. The encyclopedia.	Navigation, information management, just-in-time knowledge. The Web.
Broadcast media, centralized one- to-many communications.	Interactive, client-server, distributed, many- to-many media (the Net and Web).
Centering/centeredness, centralized knowledge.	Dispersal, dissemination, networked, distributed knowledge
Determinancy	Indeterminancy, contingency.
Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.	Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness.
Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature).	Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche.
Design and architecture of New York and Boston.	Design and architecture of LA and Las Vegas
Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human and machine	cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic
Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography	androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography
the book as sufficient bearer of the word; the library as system for printed knowledge	hypermedia as transcendence of physical limits of print media; the Web or Net as information system

Chart Created by Martin Irvine