Thursday, September 25, 2014
Dracula reading assignment and questions for Wednesday class meeting
Please read Dracula,
Chapters 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, and 27.)
Questions for short-take discussion below:
Questions for short-take discussion below:
1.
Consider the further elaboration of the vampire image as the novel continues. Dracula as creeping mist; Dracula as bat; Dracula attended with swarming rats—what sorts of horror-effects do these suggest and how do these support the demonization function (which in turn supports 1890s British xenophobia, slavophobia, and maybe homophobia)?
Consider the further elaboration of the vampire image as the novel continues. Dracula as creeping mist; Dracula as bat; Dracula attended with swarming rats—what sorts of horror-effects do these suggest and how do these support the demonization function (which in turn supports 1890s British xenophobia, slavophobia, and maybe homophobia)?
Essay a feminist reading of Dracula, with Mina Harker your main case-study. Stoker invokes the
“New Woman” of 1890s feminism ,and issues of agency are highlighted in the story (should Mina be protected and play a passive role or should Mina participate in the hunt for Dracula and play an active role; is Mina under Dracula’s control and not to be trusted or is Mina able to break free of that control; and so on). In your view, does Stoker endorse a feminist perspective where women are conceptualized in terms of active autonomy and equality with men?
3.
Zeroing in on matters of sexuality and gender, what
do you make of the manner of Dracula’s attack on Mina, involving Mina’s sucking
blood from his chest as well as Dracula’s bite to her neck, all of it later
described as Mina’s having been “infected”?
Do you see a late-Victorian male fantasy of feminine purity dramatized
here? How might such a fantasy serve to
uphold and reaffirm male domination over women?
4.
Comment on the following statement from Mina,
near the end of the novel: “Thank God for good brave men!” In your view, what idea or ideal of men and
masculinity does Stoker’s novel promote?
5.
Consider the following statement, from the
account of Mina’s infection and in light of her becoming one of Dracula’s
“Un-dead” mates: ”We men were all in tears now…we wept openly.” In your view, how does this moment of what
was considered feminine behavior fit in with Stoker’s story of brave men saving
England from the invasion of foreign demons?
6.
Think about what hypnotism does in the novel in
terms of horror-effects. What is
especially disturbing about the hypnotized subject (e.g., Mina, Lucy, Jonathan,
Renfield)? The horror aspect here?
7.
A reading against the grain: are there any ways
a postmodern reader might see in Dracula
and the vampire motif a line of resistance or revision in relation to
mainstream ideologies that, say, privilege the heterosexual family unit and
heterosexuality as absolute “norms”? So
that, for example, some of the feminist or gay or queer resonances of a
contemporary vampire story like True
Blood can be traced back to things that were potential in Stoker’s Dracula?
Dracula reading assignment and questions, for discussion on Monday
Please read Chapters 1-4, and Chapters 7, 8, and 15. (For the second discussion, we will be reading Chapters 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, and 27.)
Use one of the following items to generate your short-take material for Monday's class discussion:
1. Consider the figure of Dracula in detail, with an eye to Stoker’s fashioning of horror-effects. Does Stoker engage moves we have seen before? Chapters 1-4 offer rich examples for this. Later images of the dog and of the bat also are important. And those red eyes!
2.
Critics often highlight the xenophobia inherent
in Stoker’s depiction of Eastern Europe and Slavic peoples as borderline or
marginal “others” in relation to a British “norm.” Can you highlight some examples of how Stoker
emphasizes the strangeness, the primitiveness, and of course with Dracula, the
threatening character of these others?
(In short: how does Stoker demonize the Eastern European “other”?)
3.
And critics have just as often highlighted the
role of desire and sexuality in Stoker’s story.
What does the dynamic between Harker and Dracula suggest? Homoeroticism? And Harker’s encounter with the three
women? Do you think Stoker is
foregrounding the sexuality to build a stronger sense of how dangerous these
“others” are? Could he also be exposing
a simultaneous attraction that accompanies the repulsion (Freudian
ambivalence)? Can a Foucauldian "sexuality"-as-construct perspective work here also?
4. New concept: "Archaic Horror" involves a movement far back in time and often to remote
places apart from European civilization, as we will see in Arthur Machen’s fiction, where
pre-Christian ancient rituals and practices have survived through millennia. Does Stoker engage this mode of horror in any
way?
6.
Let’s talk about BLOOD. What roles does blood play in the story? Can you articulate a range of functions and meanings of blood (beyond the obvious fact that vampires suck it)? A few hints. Some of the primary values of blood in Western culture: blood involves the purity of family lineages and descents; blood also involves the impure, when it is linked to violence and materiality and especially to women; blood as body fluid also resonates with other body fluids—sexual, nutritive, and so on; blood figures in a well-known rhetoric that imagines kings/rulers and in a later phase capitalism and capitalists as parasitic on the life “blood” of the populace; blood in some religions is the real or imagined substance of rituals/ sacrifices that connect humans with gods/the sacred and so has ecstatic and mystical powers; finally, as a life-fluid that "flows," blood resonates with modern biopolitics and the control of flows of various kinds--urban water and sewage systems, modern transportation and market systems, and perhaps especially fantasies of bioengineering as with 1890s eugenics.
Let’s talk about BLOOD. What roles does blood play in the story? Can you articulate a range of functions and meanings of blood (beyond the obvious fact that vampires suck it)? A few hints. Some of the primary values of blood in Western culture: blood involves the purity of family lineages and descents; blood also involves the impure, when it is linked to violence and materiality and especially to women; blood as body fluid also resonates with other body fluids—sexual, nutritive, and so on; blood figures in a well-known rhetoric that imagines kings/rulers and in a later phase capitalism and capitalists as parasitic on the life “blood” of the populace; blood in some religions is the real or imagined substance of rituals/ sacrifices that connect humans with gods/the sacred and so has ecstatic and mystical powers; finally, as a life-fluid that "flows," blood resonates with modern biopolitics and the control of flows of various kinds--urban water and sewage systems, modern transportation and market systems, and perhaps especially fantasies of bioengineering as with 1890s eugenics.
1 Re the above, if we think about “biopolitics,” this may become yet more interesting: the modern British state/society focuses on maximizing the productive and reproductive life of its citizens. Is Dracula an extreme example of such focus on life, an allegory of this trend? Or the vampires a rebellious, resistant formation? Ambivalence and mixture here?
7.
Why do you think Stoker stages the arrival of
the Demeter (the vampire ship) to England with an extended description of the
tempest at sea? (Ch. 7)
8.
Mina and
Lucy’s courtship and marriage anxieties are often intermixed with Mina’s
references to “the New Woman,” a late-Victorian term that characterized
feminist movements of the day. What
attitudes—approval, misgivings—does Mina (and perhaps Stoker) register towards
“the New Woman”? Does the feminist
aspect resonate in any way with the vampire story—Lucy’s seeming independence in
reality a fatal sexual victimization?
9.
What kinds of knowledge and power does Van
Helsing’s character suggest? Is he
strictly a scientist or something more?
Why does Stoker create a non-English character to play this role?
1
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Short Take on Carmilla, due in class Wednesday, 9/24
Short Take, Carmilla
300 words minimum of commentary, to be read aloud in class. You may use critical sources, but it is not required.
Select 2 passages from Carmilla that you find interesting. Apply one or more of the Theory Frameworks to the 2 passages. In class, you will read each passage aloud, followed by your sharing your written commentary on it (you can talk the latter or read aloud from your prepared text).
Advice on analysis, here and elsewhere: don't fear the mixture and contradiction you may find in the text. Literary and cultural texts often register ambivalences, tensions and anxieties. "And yet," "at the same time, however," and similar lead-ins are useful turns that allow you to speak to layers and complexities that may connect with a range of literary and historical issues. Such moves make for interesting work.
Advice on analysis, here and elsewhere: don't fear the mixture and contradiction you may find in the text. Literary and cultural texts often register ambivalences, tensions and anxieties. "And yet," "at the same time, however," and similar lead-ins are useful turns that allow you to speak to layers and complexities that may connect with a range of literary and historical issues. Such moves make for interesting work.
Theory Frameworks
Victorian Horrors: Theory Frameworks
“Even conservative (texts and films) put on display hopes and fears that contest dominant hegemonic and hierarchical relations of power.” ….
They [also] put on display both the significant dreams and nightmares of a culture and the ways that the culture is attempting to channel them to maintain its present relations of power and domination”
1. Cognition and affect (Noel Carroll): “art horror” as it
works on the mind and the emotions via category disturbance, category
ambiguity, formlessness, magnification, massification, etc.
2. The modern bourgeois imaginary (Stallybrass and White):
horror’s cognitive and affective operators feed into a social-class construct
that does two things: distinguishes the “higher” middle classes from the “low”
poor and working classes; projects a cultural imaginary or “unconscious” of
assorted “horrors” that seduce, fascinate, and suggest a hidden or veiled
“truth.” (Note that the latter is very
close to the Freudian unconscious, which itself may be viewed as a Victorian
construct; see Foucault, HS.)
3. Bakhtin’s carnivalesque: horror’s cognitive and affective
operators work subversions and inversions of dominant social orders and
categories. Horror in the grotesque
(body distortions) and carnivalesque (collective phenomena of festival, excess,
bodies in motion) contests Victorian middle-class propriety re the body,
gender, and private and public space.
4. The rise of the modern and modernity in light of the panoptical
and biopower (Michel Foucault; DP;HS).
Modern power is elaborated via knowledge rather than punishment. Systems of classification, surveillance,
and inspection at the macro and micro levels aim to penetrate every aspect of
life (this is biopower ). Biopower involves optimal social engineering,
maximum control of populations and their “life,” meaning their productive labor
capacity. This control works at the
level of the nation, the family, and the individual. Broadly speaking, it is articulated using
concepts of the “normal” and the “pathological.” “Sex” and “sexuality” are part of this articulation:
real-life sex, bodies, and pleasures are elaborated into a “confessional”
discourse where it is assumed that “sex” is the hidden secret/”truth” of the
individual, the family, and society (Foucault effects a deconstruction of Freud
and psychoanalysis, arguing, in effect, that Freud’s work is itself a Victorian
artifact, caught up in defining “the normal” and invested in the biopolitics of
the bourgeois patriarchal “family.”)
A quick sketch of modern power/knowledge moves:
*Making the invisible visible (in service of a search for a
secret or “truth”)
*Producing imaginaries (by means of narratives and scenes of
such making-visible)
*Problematizing bodies, minds, and collectivities (the
making-visible is succeeded by all kinds of analysis, discourse, talk, sciences,
classifying, etc. about its objects)
*Constructing a “soul” or “psyche” (the minds and feelings
of individual subjects as well as collectivities [“the poor”; “savages”; “the
Irish”) are elaborated in terms of specific imaginaries and in terms of
specific rhetorics and languages of medicine, psychology, literature, etc.)
*Inducing individual and collective channels of
affect/feeling (“we are all British”; we must correct the problem of “the Great
Unwashed”; “savages are all the same, and all like children”, etc.)
Horror’s cognitive and affective operators in this context
serve to heighten what Foucault calls “the pleasure-power spiral” of
panopticism/surveillance (HS).
The thrill of horror rides along with the thrill of power as
the secret or “truth” is made visible.
Horror charges up and justifies the imperatives of the British state and
imperial power to search out and classify and bring under control resistant
layers and outliers.
Horror builds public feeling for and against, forges national and
imperial bonds using passions about “Us” versus “Them”
(of course War and its horrors are part of this story,
too).
5. Feminism and Queer Theory (Gilbert and Gubar; Armstrong;
Walkowitz; Miller; et al). The Victorian
period is itself a defining one for modern feminism. Woman writers such as the Brontes, Elizabeth
Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), and Vernon Lee implicitly and
explicitly critique patriarchal male-dominated society and imagine alternative
narratives and communities of affiliation among women. “Woman” at the same time becomes a major
fantasy site for the bourgeois imaginary (prostitutes, women of color, queer
women, femmes fatales, etc.). And women
are a main target of modern biopower, both in their reproductive capacity (the
nation needs bodies for work and for war) and as the “glue” of the normativized
“family” (cf Nancy Armstrong’s DDF for a classic reading of Jane Eyre in this
light). Notoriously, women become
“hystericized” by the new “scientific” discourses of psychiatry and
psychoanalysis, women’s putative disposition to mental as well as physical
pathology giving greater purchase to modern biopolitical power over their minds
and bodies (remember The Yellow Wallpaper?)
The pressure of the normative and the related discourse of “sex” at the
same time projects “perversions” and the concepts of gender “inversion” and
“homosexuality” (these terms did not exist until the late-Victorian period; see
HS).
This was in keeping with a biopolitical imperative of classifying bodies
and maximizing social productive power to serve capitalist economics and the
labor and military needs of the British nation-state-empire. The modern heteronormative begins here. Queer desire and gender indefinition of any
kind is classified as pathological.
In this context, horror’s cognitive and affective operators
may support stereotypical patriarchal-cultural images of improper, “dangerous”
women, and dovetail with the Victorian bourgeois-imaginary’s repulsion-attraction
to the “low” woman (prostitutes, etc.).
Similarly, the “invert” or “homosexual” gets articulated as a “horror”
serving to define the heteronormative. Conversely, horror effects may support
different lines of feminist and lgbt/queer critique and resistance (category
breakage; grotesque/carnivalesque modes; alternative knowledge/power).
6. The making of the
modern British nation-state and the British Empire. Victorian lit and culture is hugely about
imagining nation and empire. Nation as
cultural imaginary of course is built by narration, by telling stories (the
classic account is Bhaba’s Nation and
Narration). Horror tells stories
about matters fundamental to making and sustaining nation and empire: stories
about bodies, about affects, and about social orders and disorders. A cultural fantasy of purity, wholeness, and
homogeneity. A fantasy of some great One
exerting control over the Many. (We can
guess how this connects with, say, Western metaphysics and ontotheology where
monotheism and other holisms hold sway.)
In such stories, horror enlists emotional energies
traditionally evoked by the sacred, by ritual and religion (cf Herbert’s rat
worship piece). Victorian horrors then
may be viewed as performances or enactments that dramatize issues of nation and
empire. The poor swarm in their slums
and filth, like rats; they are inferior matters that must be cleaned up by
government action, by inspections, policing, and other forms of social control. The Irish are similarly imbued with horror
and have no political rights; colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Australia
are consistently represented with similar rhetoric and imagery of horror. Conrad’s Kurtz in heart of Africa intoning
“the horror, the horror” plays such issues across a double register: horror as
characteristic move of the British system that sees non-Europeans as inferior
“horrors”; horror in a further, critical turn as precisely what the British
system is itself steeped in with its violence against and its economic
exploitation of colonized peoples.
Horror: it clings, it’s contagious.
Victorian horrors can stage various potentials for the
system breaking down, being overwhelmed or exceeded or escaped from (the
Victorian “archaic” and Victorian apocalypses are two interesting turns this
takes in the 1880s-1890s). The sacred
exposes the unstable and passional nature of social order, the fundamental fact
that such order is imposed, performed, and in reality continually patching
itself together. Horror exposing the
seams and gaps, the bloody sutures holding together the social body, so to
speak.
7. These big-picture
frameworks make things pop when we look at specific cases in texts. Our process:
*ID the horror factor and consider it in light of Carroll’s
account. Categories being
unsettled? Heightening massification,
etc? Thematic or other resonances?
*Zero in using one or more of the frameworks #2-#6.
*Look very carefully and closely at form (things like point
of view, genre conventions, character patterning, etc.) and look very closely
at language (direct quotes and specific word choices, syntax, imagery and
metaphor, prosody and rhythm, etc.)
DP=Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison (classic text on panoptical, etc.)
SU Library holds all of these (except perhaps the Bakhtin--I have it if you are interested, but it's widely excerpted online and available elsewhere).
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Friday, September 5, 2014
Murder and Surveillance
PANOPTIC FOUCAULDIAN THEORY (Style 1990)
An important group of literary critics has derived from Michel Foucault's late work, especially Discipline and Punish, the idea that literary narrative polices thought and behavior.
Foucault argued that "disciplinary methods," developed since the seventeenth century, have made writing, and especially narrative description, a means of controlling and dominating:
The child, the patient, the prisoner, were to become, with increasing ease from the eighteenth century . . . the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts. This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.
(Discipline and Punish 191-92)
Since description and biographical accounts of characters are the stuff of literary narrative, it was inevitable that someone would see such narrative as part of this "method of domination." An important group of literary theorists (I will call them panoptic Foucauldians) have done just that.
Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison as a metaphor for an intrusive social surveillance:
"Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of . . . a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting" people (200, 199):
"Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of . . . a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting" people (200, 199):
All that is needed . . . is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy.... [O]ne can observe from the tower ... the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.... Each individual ... is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.
(Discipline and Punish 200)
Panoptic Foucauldians press Foucault's architectural figure into the service of interpreting literary narratives. A narrator is this supervisor, the unseen seer. Description of characters and their circumstances objectifies and dominates. As William Spanos points out, "What Foucault does not say but what his argument implicitly suggests is that the panoptic model is also applicable to literary texts" (205). Recognizing that Foucault was reluctant to apply his disciplinary theory to literature, D. A. Miller still calls "Foucauldian" his own discovery that the narrative techniques of Victorian novels are working "the modes of `social control' that Foucault called discipline." Bentham's supervisor becomes a narrative "ideal of unseen but all-seeing surveillance," an ideal that serves "a regime of the norm, in which normalizing perceptions, prescriptions, and sanctions are diffused in discourses and practices throughout the social fabric" (viii).
For panoptic Foucauldians such as Miller and Mark Seltzer, narration is the police. They interpret not merely the criminal justice system, which appears as the content of many narratives, but narrative technique itself, as an important component of intrusive normalizing disciplinary power. Thus Miller turns "from the discipline narrated in the novel to the discipline inherent in the novel's technique of narration" (52). In its minute detailing of character and circumstance, narrative extends the normalizing power of surveillance to every aspect of life. It is in this sense that Miller can maintain that "representational techniques" systematically "participate in a general economy of policing power" (2). And Seltzer can find "a `criminal continuity' between the techniques of representation . . . and the technologies of power" (13-14).[1]
To my knowledge, Foucault never proposed a theory of the detective story, and yet for both Miller and Seltzer, the detective story is crucial. In panoptic Foucauldian interpretation of literary technique, all narrative becomes a detective-like invasion of privacy.[2] Miller says panoptic narrative techniques find their "most programmatic embodiment in detective fiction" (28), since "the police supervision that it embodies . . . marks an explicit bringing-under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative" (33). For Seltzer, detective fiction, which becomes "indistinguishable from a fantasy of surveillance" (34), is merely the most obvious form of "omniscient narration" that grants the narrative voice an unlimited authority over . . . a world thoroughly known and thoroughly mastered by the panoptic `eye' of the narration" (5455)
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 3
Additional passages here that Herbert references, preceding the Jack Black story:
http://dl.tufts.edu/catalog/tei/tufts:UA069.005.DO.00079/chapter/c1s2
http://dl.tufts.edu/catalog/tei/tufts:UA069.005.DO.00079/chapter/c1s2
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