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I am not making this up.
The world’s foremost vampire experts gathered last week at the University of Hull, in the United Kingdom, to discuss recent trends in, um, Gothic literature. The meeting, marking the centenary of the death of Dracula author Bram Stoker, apparently devolved into a discussion about the problem with the American vampire.
According to an article by Matthew Reisz in the Times Higher Education:
In the conference’s keynote lecture, Clive Bloom, emeritus professor of English and American literature at Middlesex University, argued that “Gothic studies have become institutionalised and safe. We need to return to a more visceral and scary notion of the Gothic. We need to stop using Freud and go back to de Sade - it’s all about perversity and the will to power.”
Professor Bloom also regretted “the Americanisation of the vampire” to be found, for example, in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, where “the dangerous violent aristocrat has become the dark boy no one talks to and who’s eternally 17”.
The dangerous violent aristocrat was, however, also fictional so this seems like a rather inside baseball sort of concern, but whatever keeps them entertained….
Two years ago some American academics expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the Twilight series, reasoning that they might be able to use the popular story to help facilitate an interest in philosophy.
We await an update on how that’s working out.
The opinions of the world’s undead on this issue are not recorded. [Image via]
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Crissa on April 26, 2012 1:22 PM:
The vampire was fictional, but the dangerous violent aristocrat part was not; there's bone fields that tell that tale.
Snarki, child of Loki on April 27, 2012 9:52 AM:
When classics are translated into popular media, the villains (evil-doers, bad guys, objects of fear) are almost invariably morphed into whatever is the boogie-man du jour.
"Scary high-schoolers running amok" seems to be a perennial favorite in the US.