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Agenda
• The Omnipresence of Dracula
• Fear and phobia
• Fear in / and Dracula (Aristotle, Freud, Marx)
• Literary Darwinism
Fear and phobia
• “The emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some possible evil.” (OED)
• ”A fear, horror, strong dislike, or aversion; esp. an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance.” (OED)
Fear in / and Dracula
What produces fear in Dracula?
What kind of fear is produced by Dracula?– Tragic: Pity and terror (Aristotle).– Gothic: The Uncanny (Freud).– The fear of liberal humanism: Capital (Marx)– Evolutionary: natural and sexual selection
(Darwin)
The fear of tragedy: Pity and terror.
• Tragic hero; tragic flaw.
• Hamlet: hesitation
• Macbeth: ambition
Gothic fear:The Uncanny
• Das Unheimliche– Heimlich: a) homely, known; b) secret, hidden.– Unheimlich: unhomely, yet strangely familiar
• Dracula = the uncanny: he (unconsciously) reminds us of our own Id.
• The hunt for Dracula = (unconsciously) reminds us of our own Id, our repressed oedipal desires.
The fear of liberal humanism: Capital
• Liberal humanism: freedom, liberty, and equality– Money must have a moral end: amelioration,
improving, making better, the human condition.
• Monopolistic capitalism– The accumulation of capital is an end in itself
• Dracula as an image of capitalism
Evolutionary fear: Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1858)
• Natural selection, or how to survive:– The bodies and minds of organisms are the
result of evolved adaptations designed to help the organism survive in a particular environment
– Organs, skin, bones– The senses– The emotions: fear
Evolutionary fear: Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
• Sexual selection, or how to secure a mate:– Organisms (male / female) can evolve traits
designed to secure a mate (female / male) through attraction or competition
– The peacock’s tail– Antlers– Beauty – Courtship (dating) rituals and conventions
A receipt for courtship (1805)
• Two or three dears, and two or three sweets; • Two or three balls, and two or three treats; • Two or three serenades, given as a lure; • Two or three oaths how much they endure; • Two or three messages sent in a day; • Two or three times led out from the play; • Two or three soft speeches made by the way; • Two or three tickets for two or three times; • Two or three love letters writ all in rhymes; • Two or three months keeping strict to these rules, • Can never fail making a couple of fools.
Literary Darwinism
• “One thing literature offers is data. Fast, inexhaustible, cross-cultural and cheap.” (Jonathan Gotschall).
• Literature is data that helps elucidating human nature
Literary Darwinism
• General aim:• To demonstrate that human behaviour is the
result of innate rather than culturally specific patterns
• To identify the universals of life: child bearing and rearing, love, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families, groups, and communities.
First focus: Characters and action as referencing universal patterns of behaviour
• Pride and Prejudice• 2nd generation: Women compete to marry high-status
men. Men compete to marry the most attractive women): • Darcy• Elizabeth• Wickham• Lydia• 1st generation: By marrying off their daughters to the
right males, parents secure that their genetic material is passed on in the most effective way.
• Mrs Bennett• Mr Bennett
First focus: Characters and action as referencing universal patterns of behaviour
• Hamlet
• Hamlet’s dilemma is personal and political and biological and genetic: Either Hamlet rises to power by killing his uncle, i.e. his mother’s new husband or he lets his uncle live, paving the way for a batch of half-brothers and – sisters with whom he has genes in common.
First focus: Characters and action as referencing universal patterns of behaviour
• But what about:
• The narrator? (irony)
• The genre? (the novel, drama)
• The medium? (writing, the stage)
• Modes and periods?
Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write
fiction?
• Literature instructs us (Horace: To teach and delight):– It teaches us about space, time, and patterns of
cause and effect, making us more adaptive and more capable of passing on our genes.
– Literature is designed to help us cope with life’s complexity: enhances our interpretative competences.
– Literature is a kind of fitness training: by imagining situations you stand a better chance of succeeding when they occur in real life.
– Strong narrative bias: what about, for instance, lyric poetry? What about rhyme? Metre?
Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write
fiction?
– Literature is a sex display designed to waste the competition (antlers)
– Rarely handed down, though!
Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write
fiction?
• Literature is a sign of abundant resources (material, physical, psychological)
• By its utter uselessness, literature is a sign of the fact that the reader or writer has resources to spare (the peacock’s tail)
• Rarely handed down, though!
Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write
fiction?
• Literature is a community builder– Literature integrates humans into a single
culture. Cultural and social cohesion produces survival advantages.
– But are cultural communities really unifying in this way? Today?
Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write
fiction?
• Literature is a kind of magic, religion, or wish fulfilment.– We like to tell and listen to stories of success
in order to ensure success in the future.– But this seems a bit like sublimation?
Dracula and the issue of natural selection• Dracula does not concern natural
selection, or the evolutionary struggle to survive through adaption
• Humans and vampires do not compete over the limited resources
• Host – parasite, prey - predator
Dracula and the issue of sexual selection
• Lucy Westenra and her three male suitors (Quincy Morris, Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood) pp. 73-77
Dracula and the issue of sexual selection
• Mina’s refusal of Dracula:– Seward’s point of view (336)– Mina’s point of view (343)