Moodle

This course aims at providing an overview survey of the most important topics and themes pertinent to a Cultural Studies analysis of North American literature, cinema, television, and other areas of cultural production. As part of our course program, we will look at the historical development of the settler colonial states of the United States and Canada, their national and regional aspects and imaginaries, as well as historical events relevant for the processes of the formation of national identities and discourses in North America. By doing so, we will consider histories and cultures of diverse ethnic groups: First Peoples, African Americans, Hispano/a- Americans, Asian Americans. We will concern ourselves with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality, as well as with women’s history in North American societies. We will critically interrogate the myths and imaginaries that constitute “America” as a place of imagination, for, as Edward Ashbee puts it, “America is—to a greater extent than any other country—an idea.” Finally, we will take a look at the processes of globalization and Americanization that to a great degree shape contemporary economic and cultural realities worldwide.

Count Dracula, the imaginative creation of a nineteenth-century Irishman, has long since penetrated cultural archives outside the UK and Ireland and became, for all intents and purposes, a global phenomenon. The United States is not only no exception, but in fact one of the most diligent suppliers for the global brand Dracula. This comes as no surprise, considering that America has been encoded into Bram Stocker’s text from the start: if the figure of Count Dracula, a Transylvanian lord, is drenched in exoticism of marked foreignness and difference, so is the figure of the Texan Quincy Morris. Apart from feeding the general vampire hype in the US popular culture, in recent decades Bram Stocker’s Dracula underwent a number of narrative revisions and reinterpretations in American popular fiction. In this class, we will focus on these explicit reinterpretations, tracing the cultural energies and significance of Dracula’s transatlantic connections.    

Primary Texts

Bram Stoker, Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, 1997. ISBN 978-0393970128

Fred Saberhagen, The Dracula Tape. Any edition you can find, including Kindle edition.

 Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian. Back Bay Books, 2006. ISBN 978-0316057882