Vampire Religion and Capitalism: A Critical Analysis of Gothic Literature and Culture
WEEK 1 Introduction: Vampire Religion
Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category”
Religion: (1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Symbol: any object, act, event, quality, or relation that serves as a vehicle for conception
Cultural and Social/Psychological
Produce two kinds of dispositions
Motivations: are ‘made meaningful’ with reference to the ends towards which they are conceived to conduce
Moods: are ‘made meaningful’ with reference to the conditions from which they are conceived to spring
Christopher Herbert, “Vampire Religion”
Superstition: the thought system of primitive society
Dracula embraces the idea that immortality, particularly in the sexual realm, signifies uncleanness.
The code of uncleanness, by contrast, expresses the archaic principle of taboo
Uncleanness as a literal reality, rather than a figure of speech
A vampire becomes “hard, cruel, and sensual” in the same way one would contract rabies or AIDS
Exchange of infectiously contaminated bodily fluids
Vampirism in Dracula as a metaphor for the blood libel (lunatic claim that Jews murder Christians to draw their blood).
Christianity vs Vampirism
Eucharist: worshipers drink the blood of the deity to gain everlasting life
Vampirism: the deity drinks the blood of the worshiper to gain “the curse of immortality”
WEEK 2 Vampire Religion 2
Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves
Blends literary analysis of vampire texts with a cultural reading of how vampirism infects our thoughts
First Chapter: considers Romantic conventions regarding marriage and friendship in relation to various nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional, theatrical, and film texts figuring the vampire as an intimate
Ghost trap (a pair of spring-controlled doors cut into the scenery) encourages audiences to perceive vampires as disembodied spirits
Vampires dependence on the moon –> cinematic treatment of monsters
Shakespearean vision of moon as an enchanted eroticism contrasted with mid-Victorian idea that the moon is the the balm that joins death to life
Varney the Vampire
Preternatural yet bound by human relationships
Transform victims into his own kind
an increasingly representative interloper in a predatory society
Similar to other social predators in literature
Carmilla
one of the few self-accepting homosexuals in Victorian or any literature
Contrasts female model of vampirism to male model
as a woman, the vampiric friend releases a boundless capacity for being intimate
Second Chapter: pivots around a discussion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula comparing that work to F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu as a version of the animalistic Dracula
Dracula – “belongs to me”
Right of possession according to the hierarchy
Is an isolated figure, who is unable to bond in the way of other male characters in the novel
Does not infect other men but makes pawns of infected women
Illuminates legal restrictions regarding sexuality in late 19th century
Third Chapter: traces the various transmutations of psychic vampirism in fiction contemporary
Psychic vampires are more or less powerfully masculine, perverse, marginal, and/or parasitically feminine
Doyle and Freeman
link psychic vampirism to”womanly dependence” to the old maid and the helpless
More interested in soul stealing than blood sucking
Without souls of their own, they hunger after others’
- Fourth Chapter: ambitiously charts out how the promise embodied in 1970s vampires gives way to the”depressed creature” of the Reagan years
WEEK 9: Capitalism
Marx, “On the Jewish Question”
The representation of capital or the capitalist as a vampire was, then, common both to Marx and to popular fiction in the mid-nineteenth century. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this representation mobilized vampire fiction at this time, to produce a striking figure defined by excess and unrestrained appetite – whose strength increased, the more victims he consumed.
Association between the vampire and the Jew.
In Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”, the Jew was identified as a figure who epitomized the excesses of capitalism – its appetite, its cumulative powers, its mobility, its increasing internationalism.
The Jew was committed “egotistical need and huckstering”, reducing every relation to “commerce” – recalling Dracula’s “selfishness” and “remorseless” purpose.
Three fold connection exists: the Jew, capital, and the vampire
McNally, “Marx’s Monsters”
Shows that capitalism really is a monstrous system that sucks the blood (vampire-like) out of living labour and turns human beings into robotic zombies. Capitalism turns human beings into commodities even by selling their body parts after their death (and sometimes before death). The language of monsters and vampires is not so much a metaphor of the capitalist mode of production, but a reality. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour. Human beings are separated from their product of their work by capital and market exchange and can even become part of the process of exchange themselves. Under capitalism, human beings are disempowered and become lifeless like zombies. Illuminates the way human bodies are systematically ground up by the gears of global capitalism
The secret of capitalism resides in this fragmentation of the labouring self, in the way that wage-labourers turn over their bodies of value to capital in incremental bits over a lifetime. The time workers give over to capital is ‘dead time’, time separate from their ‘real’ lives, a sort of death-in-life. No wonder, then, that images of the living dead proliferate so widely in the capitalist culture-industry. And no wonder too that workers newly subjected to the pressures of commodification find this death-in-life anything but normal. Typically, they encounter it as positively demonic – an unnatural and depraved theft of their life-energies
Ferrara, The Addiction (1995)
What happens when you relinquish your soul to the idea that life is already predetermined?
When the film connects Kathleen’s struggle to resist evil to My Lai and the Holocaust, those comparisons are exploitative in a way that even a genre-bending film can’t get away with. Every victim of a vampire has an unbelievable tendency to whimper,”Please” when pleading for his life, which sets up straw humans to resist evil.
Setting: Washington square park (NYU) in the 1980’s
WEEK 10: Capitalism 2
Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear”
Giroux, “Zombie Politics”
Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity”
Halberstam’s analysis focuses primarily on the dichotomy between surface and depth or inside and outside, which the monster “embodies” through the visible layer of its skin and the secret depths underneath. Based on this central trope, as well as the etymology of the word “monster” itself, Halberstam suggests that Gothic monsters are overdetermined signifiers, figures of excess that organize the interplay of several discourses, inviting the reader to suppress some strands of discourse while foregrounding others. Gothic monsters, by making the very process of interpretation visible, reveal more about the interpreter than about themselves. Examining Stoker’s likening of Dracula to a “mist”, a “red cloud”, to a ghost or a shadow until he is invited into the home, at which point he becomes solid and fleshly, exposes the “stitches,” the artifice, the seams of what our culture wants us to perceive as whole, organic, and seamless. Ultimately, they always mean too much, and therefore too little.