ENGL 246/001: Literature and Film
Term 1 | MWF 2:00-3:00pm
Vampires on Page and Screen: Transfusions and Transmutations
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula
Updated August 20.
This course examines adaptations in something of the way vampire transformations work, by considering how elements of appearance remain but the resulting creature is always radically different. We’ll go in prepared, not with stakes and garlic but with the critical and theoretical tools needed to move beyond popular online discussions and enable consideration of ideological, political, and cultural questions arising in creating through adaptation a new and separate text in a different genre. Our approach will be more that of literary and cultural studies than film studies, as we consider why stories about vampires, the blood-drinking immortals of myth and legend – and more recently of fiction and film – fascinate us and their adapters, and to what extent visualizing them results a transfusion, a transmutation, or both.
Core texts will include Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla plus Emily Harris’s 2019 eponymous film adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula plus two adaptations: possibilities include Nosferatu (either Murnau or Herzog), Dracula (1931; Tod Browning), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992; Francis Ford Coppola). There will also be a list of optional adaptations that I will mention in lectures and you might mention in essays and discussion. We might also, in differentiating between the characteristics of print and film as vehicles for narrative, have a look at Angela Carter’s unadapted vampire short story “The Lady of the House of Love” and at Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive, which is not an adaptation. All films, required and optional, will be available to stream for free through Library Online Course Reserves. As well, academic readings in theory and criticism specifically concerned with adaptation, as well as in Gothic studies, will be set and provided through Library Online Course Reserves. I have ordered the Broadview edition of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula through the UBC Bookstore.
Evaluation will be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.
Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.