We had the tantalizing beginnings of a conversation today about various forms of distraction from reading -- both visual and auditory. The main forms of *visual* distraction that we identified were films, television, video games, and the internet (recognizing that there is some overlap among those categories, of course).
It was also asserted that *auditory* stimuli -- particularly music on an MP3 player -- can take one's attention and energy away from reading. This is clearly the case for at least some of you.
On the other hand, it was also asserted (and I have heard this said a number of times before today) that having music on, in the background, can actually *help* one focus one's concentration when one is studying. On the surface of things at least, this seems to suggest that music is, or can be, an aid to concentration rather than a distraction from it.
Discuss.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Catullus and Love
In class we have been mapping out a putative chronology of the Lesbia poems of Catullus. We are well aware of the pitfalls of the biographical fallacy, and also -- even assuming total historicity here -- of the inevitable limitations of our knowledge about the relationship.
That said, there does seem to be some trajectory to this relationship as Catullus portrays it in his poems. This does not automatically mean that the relationship 'ends' -- and indeed the serious suggestion was offered (in class) that this sort of love *never* ends.
Discuss -- either with specific relation to Catullus, or in more general/universal terms, or both.
That said, there does seem to be some trajectory to this relationship as Catullus portrays it in his poems. This does not automatically mean that the relationship 'ends' -- and indeed the serious suggestion was offered (in class) that this sort of love *never* ends.
Discuss -- either with specific relation to Catullus, or in more general/universal terms, or both.
Brain (D)evolution
It was suggested in class today that too much use of the visual cortex of the brain can cause neglect or atrophy of other portions of the brain -- and thus, of other types of brain function.
Discuss.
Discuss.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Interview With(out) A Vampire
The following cyber-interview of Professor Kirby was conducted on 10 March 2010 by Baker Pylorus-Elks, a young scholar working in the Atlanta area, as part of an ongoing year-long project. No vampires were harmed in the course of this dialogue.
~~~~~ · ~~~~~
BAKER PYLORUS-ELKS: Do you feel that the characteristics of the traditional European vampire have been altered to correspond with American culture? Why?
JOHN T. KIRBY: Absolutely, because the figure of the vampire (I believe) functions as a kind of screen upon which we project some of our deepest fears (and wildest fantasies) about our own selves: in short, about what it means to be human. Such projections are always inevitably situated in a particular time and culture. So the mediaeval European vampire would almost necessarily have to undergo some radical change in order to speak to current American culture.
This was already the case, in several respects, with the single most important vampire in art: Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. Dracula, the novel, was published in London in 1897, and the vast majority of the action is set in the England of that period (Stoker himself never travelled east of Yorkshire, so he was dependent upon book-descriptions of Transylvania and the Carpathians). But the historical Vlad Ţepeş, who in some (not all!) respects was the model for Stoker's Dracula, lived in the 15th century (and was a sovereign prince, not a mere count). Stoker, then, has already had to do a certain amount of altering -- by virtue of the very contours of his plot -- in order to create a character that would be able to make himself at home in fin-de-siècle England.
And indeed, Stoker's own precursors in the genre -- for example, John Polidori, friend and physician of Lord Byron, and author of the first vampire story in English -- 'The Vampyre' -- had already perpetrated a gigantic alteration on the typical profile of the vampire.
Prior to Polidori's tale, vampires (in European legend) were typically poor peasant types, perhaps even social outcasts, and their post-mortem existence was seen in one way or another as a continuation of their miserable lifetimes. Polidori's Lord Ruthven, on the other hand, is strangely charismatic -- and, what is more, aristocratic. Some speculate that in this regard Lord Ruthven is himself modeled on Lord Byron; whether or not that is the case, Polidori dramatically changed the socioeconomic parameters of vampire lore by portraying his vampire as a nobleman. This was picked up in turn by Polidori's successor, Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novella Carmilla features a countess; and of course by Stoker himself, whose Dracula owes demonstrable debts both to Polidori and to Le Fanu.
BPE: How big of a role has commercialization played in the evolution of the vampire?
JTK: I would say that commercialization is likely always to play a role in art commensurate with the money at stake (no pun intended). In particular, as long as the US economy is a capitalist system, commerce will always remain a major factor in American art.
If the work of art in question is a novel that the publishing house expects (or needs) to become a bestseller, the marketing angle alone will be highly commercialized. Commercialization in publishing reaches every conceivable aspect of the project, from the designing of the cover and the choice of a typeface, to the amount (if any) of the advance given to the author pre-publication, to the marketing program before and after the first printing hits the stands. In some cases, the editing itself may also be tailored to commercial requirements.
If the work of art we're talking about is a film, the parameters will be similar: a large-scale Hollywood blockbuster will require a huge budget and/for the 'right' director, actors, and so on, whereas a small art-house or indie film will likely be less commercial.
One of the interesting questions to be considered under this heading is the relationship of artistic freedom to the demands of commerce. If the artist has backers who feel that the direction the artist is headed in may be detrimental to the bottom line, they are likely to exert some pressure on the artist to conform with guidelines they feel will be the most commercially successful.
Another question, possibly related to the previous, is the issue of audiences: specifically, suitability for young people who might be reading the book or watching the movie. Vampire lore is, after all, potentially highly erotic and/or gruesome, and may be deemed unsuitable for minors. (This was a very conscious guiding principle for Stephenie Meyer, the author of the wildly popular Twilight tetralogy; a practicing Mormon, Meyer did not want teen readers being exposed to 'gratuitous sex' in her fiction. The result is a very particular type of novel, both in terms of what it includes and what it omits. Her vampires, particularly the Cullen family, hew to an austere moral code that Vlad the Impaler, and his avatar Count Dracula, would find laughable -- and that most ordinary humans would find impossibly challenging. At the same time, they are far more erotic (without being overtly sexual) than anything in Stoker or before (with the possible exception of certain demure references in Le Fanu's Carmilla to some undeniably steamy interactions). I will have more to say about sex and eroticism in just a moment.
BPE: Why do you feel that the symbol of the vampire has been romanticized in modern pop culture?
JTK: Love and hate, attraction and repulsion, are primal polarities in the human psyche. Indeed this notion has been around at least since the ancient Greeks; the presocratic philosopher Empedocles built an entire cosmological system around the idea.
Early (i.e. pre-Polidori) representations of the vampire were profoundly hateful and repulsive; it was only a matter of time before the polarity was inevitably going to switch. Chances are that it will eventually switch again.
But for now -- and here we are harking back to your question about commercialization -- sex (or at least the erotic) is such a powerfully saleable commodity in art, that it is hard to imagine it vanishing from the realm of any art that has a commercial aspect. Things can certainly change radically; if you look at the jaw-droppingly graphic depictions of sexual behavior in the 18th-century Chinese novel 《紅樓夢》Hong Lou Meng, and compare these with the severely puritanical mores of the Maoist regime, you will see just how far the pendulum can swing. So we should not be surprised if the vampire is eventually de-romanticized. The question in that case would be: What would replace the romanticism? How would/could artists re-create the figure of the vampire, deleting all romanticizing elements or even working against them, and still produce art that would attract an audience?
BPE: Is there an American vampire that you feel has stayed true to the traditional European characteristics?
JTK: It depends on what you mean by an 'American' vampire. Would you count a vampire created by an American artist, even if the character is not represented as being an American citizen? If so, consider Elizabeth Kostova's Dracula (in The Historian). He is very consciously meant to resonate closely with Stoker's Count Dracula, in some ways, and the historical Vlad Ţepeş, in others.
(All the same, he is arguably not as repulsive as either, for reasons specific to her novel.) Ditto the Dracula of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula (on both counts) (again, no pun intended!).
I should also point out that it depends upon what you mean by 'traditional' here. We are dealing with many layers of tradition(s), from a number of different times and places -- on the European Continent, in Great Britain, and in the USA. Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker were all breaking with 'tradition' in certain fundamental respects. Anne Rice, perhaps more than any single other author since Stoker, broke with what we might call the Stokerian tradition, in ways that (I would argue) have decisively and massively affected all subsequent artists in fiction and film. The creators of the HBO series True Blood and the Twilight books and films have added new layers to the (principally American) tradition, which is itself rooted in various ways in the European.
BPE: Why is a figure that represents death so appealing to modern society?
JTK: That is a particularly wonderful question. Again, I believe it has to do with those polarities we discussed above. Sigmund Freud, late in life, postulated that human existence is motivated by two basic (antithetical) drives: eros and thanatos -- the latter, of course, being death.
If he is right about that, and I surmise that in some sense he is, then our attraction to death would be a sort of approach/avoidance mechanism -- a simultaneous fear of, and fascination with, the end that awaits us all.
And, of course, in the figure of the vampire, eros and thanatos are themselves united and given tremendous combined power. In other words, I believe the attraction you are talking about here is not just to thanatos alone: it is to thanatos plus eros, thanatos combined with and compounded by eros. (We are back to your topic of romanticism when we contemplate the famous line of Keats, 'I have been half in love with easeful death.')
BPE: With the current depiction of vampires in movies, television, and literature, do you foresee a return to the traditional portrayal of vampires?
JTK: Anything can happen, of course, but frankly I would be rather surprised to see the salient characteristics of today's vampires -- the distinctive traits, for the most part, of the American tradition -- disappearing entirely. Society may simply become weary of all this vampirism (though, again, I doubt it); or, alternatively, we may see an ongoing attempt to expand and embroider our current trove of vampire lore and legend. Indeed we are already seeing a certain amount of this in the current cinema: consider, for example, the Underworld series (2003, 2006, 2009), in which the vampire legendarium is quite extensively braided with that of the werewolf. And that strategy has been adopted in the Twilight projects as well.
Continuing innovation will become increasingly difficult, as we seem already to have hit many (if not most) of the most sensitive topics, the most resonant symbols. But human creativity never ceases to amaze. The vampires being depicted fifty years from now might completely astound you. Perhaps you will remember this conversation when you are examining the distinctive traits of vampire lore in 2060.
~~~~~ · ~~~~~
JOHN T. KIRBY is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Miami. He has so far published five books, and numerous articles and book chapters, on various aspects of classical literature and culture, and is currently working on a book about vampires. He has taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels on 'The Vampire in Folklore, Fiction, and Film,' and has led an academic study tour to Romania, in the course of which students visited the birthplace, palaces and fortresses, and (empty!) tomb of Vlad Ţepeş.
(All images Wikimedia Commons; used by permission or under fair use.)
BAKER PYLORUS-ELKS: Do you feel that the characteristics of the traditional European vampire have been altered to correspond with American culture? Why?
JOHN T. KIRBY: Absolutely, because the figure of the vampire (I believe) functions as a kind of screen upon which we project some of our deepest fears (and wildest fantasies) about our own selves: in short, about what it means to be human. Such projections are always inevitably situated in a particular time and culture. So the mediaeval European vampire would almost necessarily have to undergo some radical change in order to speak to current American culture.
This was already the case, in several respects, with the single most important vampire in art: Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. Dracula, the novel, was published in London in 1897, and the vast majority of the action is set in the England of that period (Stoker himself never travelled east of Yorkshire, so he was dependent upon book-descriptions of Transylvania and the Carpathians). But the historical Vlad Ţepeş, who in some (not all!) respects was the model for Stoker's Dracula, lived in the 15th century (and was a sovereign prince, not a mere count). Stoker, then, has already had to do a certain amount of altering -- by virtue of the very contours of his plot -- in order to create a character that would be able to make himself at home in fin-de-siècle England.And indeed, Stoker's own precursors in the genre -- for example, John Polidori, friend and physician of Lord Byron, and author of the first vampire story in English -- 'The Vampyre' -- had already perpetrated a gigantic alteration on the typical profile of the vampire.
Prior to Polidori's tale, vampires (in European legend) were typically poor peasant types, perhaps even social outcasts, and their post-mortem existence was seen in one way or another as a continuation of their miserable lifetimes. Polidori's Lord Ruthven, on the other hand, is strangely charismatic -- and, what is more, aristocratic. Some speculate that in this regard Lord Ruthven is himself modeled on Lord Byron; whether or not that is the case, Polidori dramatically changed the socioeconomic parameters of vampire lore by portraying his vampire as a nobleman. This was picked up in turn by Polidori's successor, Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novella Carmilla features a countess; and of course by Stoker himself, whose Dracula owes demonstrable debts both to Polidori and to Le Fanu.BPE: How big of a role has commercialization played in the evolution of the vampire?
JTK: I would say that commercialization is likely always to play a role in art commensurate with the money at stake (no pun intended). In particular, as long as the US economy is a capitalist system, commerce will always remain a major factor in American art.
If the work of art in question is a novel that the publishing house expects (or needs) to become a bestseller, the marketing angle alone will be highly commercialized. Commercialization in publishing reaches every conceivable aspect of the project, from the designing of the cover and the choice of a typeface, to the amount (if any) of the advance given to the author pre-publication, to the marketing program before and after the first printing hits the stands. In some cases, the editing itself may also be tailored to commercial requirements.
If the work of art we're talking about is a film, the parameters will be similar: a large-scale Hollywood blockbuster will require a huge budget and/for the 'right' director, actors, and so on, whereas a small art-house or indie film will likely be less commercial.
One of the interesting questions to be considered under this heading is the relationship of artistic freedom to the demands of commerce. If the artist has backers who feel that the direction the artist is headed in may be detrimental to the bottom line, they are likely to exert some pressure on the artist to conform with guidelines they feel will be the most commercially successful.
Another question, possibly related to the previous, is the issue of audiences: specifically, suitability for young people who might be reading the book or watching the movie. Vampire lore is, after all, potentially highly erotic and/or gruesome, and may be deemed unsuitable for minors. (This was a very conscious guiding principle for Stephenie Meyer, the author of the wildly popular Twilight tetralogy; a practicing Mormon, Meyer did not want teen readers being exposed to 'gratuitous sex' in her fiction. The result is a very particular type of novel, both in terms of what it includes and what it omits. Her vampires, particularly the Cullen family, hew to an austere moral code that Vlad the Impaler, and his avatar Count Dracula, would find laughable -- and that most ordinary humans would find impossibly challenging. At the same time, they are far more erotic (without being overtly sexual) than anything in Stoker or before (with the possible exception of certain demure references in Le Fanu's Carmilla to some undeniably steamy interactions). I will have more to say about sex and eroticism in just a moment.BPE: Why do you feel that the symbol of the vampire has been romanticized in modern pop culture?
JTK: Love and hate, attraction and repulsion, are primal polarities in the human psyche. Indeed this notion has been around at least since the ancient Greeks; the presocratic philosopher Empedocles built an entire cosmological system around the idea.
Early (i.e. pre-Polidori) representations of the vampire were profoundly hateful and repulsive; it was only a matter of time before the polarity was inevitably going to switch. Chances are that it will eventually switch again.
But for now -- and here we are harking back to your question about commercialization -- sex (or at least the erotic) is such a powerfully saleable commodity in art, that it is hard to imagine it vanishing from the realm of any art that has a commercial aspect. Things can certainly change radically; if you look at the jaw-droppingly graphic depictions of sexual behavior in the 18th-century Chinese novel 《紅樓夢》Hong Lou Meng, and compare these with the severely puritanical mores of the Maoist regime, you will see just how far the pendulum can swing. So we should not be surprised if the vampire is eventually de-romanticized. The question in that case would be: What would replace the romanticism? How would/could artists re-create the figure of the vampire, deleting all romanticizing elements or even working against them, and still produce art that would attract an audience?BPE: Is there an American vampire that you feel has stayed true to the traditional European characteristics?
JTK: It depends on what you mean by an 'American' vampire. Would you count a vampire created by an American artist, even if the character is not represented as being an American citizen? If so, consider Elizabeth Kostova's Dracula (in The Historian). He is very consciously meant to resonate closely with Stoker's Count Dracula, in some ways, and the historical Vlad Ţepeş, in others.
(All the same, he is arguably not as repulsive as either, for reasons specific to her novel.) Ditto the Dracula of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula (on both counts) (again, no pun intended!).I should also point out that it depends upon what you mean by 'traditional' here. We are dealing with many layers of tradition(s), from a number of different times and places -- on the European Continent, in Great Britain, and in the USA. Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker were all breaking with 'tradition' in certain fundamental respects. Anne Rice, perhaps more than any single other author since Stoker, broke with what we might call the Stokerian tradition, in ways that (I would argue) have decisively and massively affected all subsequent artists in fiction and film. The creators of the HBO series True Blood and the Twilight books and films have added new layers to the (principally American) tradition, which is itself rooted in various ways in the European.
BPE: Why is a figure that represents death so appealing to modern society?
JTK: That is a particularly wonderful question. Again, I believe it has to do with those polarities we discussed above. Sigmund Freud, late in life, postulated that human existence is motivated by two basic (antithetical) drives: eros and thanatos -- the latter, of course, being death.
If he is right about that, and I surmise that in some sense he is, then our attraction to death would be a sort of approach/avoidance mechanism -- a simultaneous fear of, and fascination with, the end that awaits us all.And, of course, in the figure of the vampire, eros and thanatos are themselves united and given tremendous combined power. In other words, I believe the attraction you are talking about here is not just to thanatos alone: it is to thanatos plus eros, thanatos combined with and compounded by eros. (We are back to your topic of romanticism when we contemplate the famous line of Keats, 'I have been half in love with easeful death.')
BPE: With the current depiction of vampires in movies, television, and literature, do you foresee a return to the traditional portrayal of vampires?
JTK: Anything can happen, of course, but frankly I would be rather surprised to see the salient characteristics of today's vampires -- the distinctive traits, for the most part, of the American tradition -- disappearing entirely. Society may simply become weary of all this vampirism (though, again, I doubt it); or, alternatively, we may see an ongoing attempt to expand and embroider our current trove of vampire lore and legend. Indeed we are already seeing a certain amount of this in the current cinema: consider, for example, the Underworld series (2003, 2006, 2009), in which the vampire legendarium is quite extensively braided with that of the werewolf. And that strategy has been adopted in the Twilight projects as well.
Continuing innovation will become increasingly difficult, as we seem already to have hit many (if not most) of the most sensitive topics, the most resonant symbols. But human creativity never ceases to amaze. The vampires being depicted fifty years from now might completely astound you. Perhaps you will remember this conversation when you are examining the distinctive traits of vampire lore in 2060.
JOHN T. KIRBY is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Miami. He has so far published five books, and numerous articles and book chapters, on various aspects of classical literature and culture, and is currently working on a book about vampires. He has taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels on 'The Vampire in Folklore, Fiction, and Film,' and has led an academic study tour to Romania, in the course of which students visited the birthplace, palaces and fortresses, and (empty!) tomb of Vlad Ţepeş.
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