#5: Performing Death and Desire: Vampires on Stage and Screen
Instructed by Dr. Aoise Stratford at Cornell University
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Are vampires bloodthirsty creatures who seek to bring an end to humankind? Or are they simply starving for human love and affection? Contemporary takes on vampirism, like those of the popular Twilight and Vampire Diaries series, would have you believe it is the latter.
Historically, vampires haven’t sparkled. But from what lore, then, is the predatory nature of vampires-past derived? And can they really be stopped with a clove of garlic or by driving a stake through their heart?
At Cornell University, Dr. Aoise Stratford and her students explore the pervasive myth of the vampire from both an institutional and creative perspective.
#5: Performing Death and Desire: Vampires on Stage and Screen
School: Cornell University
Course: Performing Death and Desire: Vampires on Stage and Screen
Instructor: Dr. Aoise Stratford
Course Description:
This 2000 level multi-disciplinary course hunts the dangerous and subversive figure of the vampire across a variety of pages, stages, and screens. We’ll explore a campy melodrama from the 19th century, a sensual ballet, a raucous stage comedy, cinema classics, politically savvy television — and all the Draculas that have come and gone in between. Drawing on theatre, film, television, and dance, we’ll ask how the vampire articulates Otherness and how it is constructed, appropriated, adapted, reinvented, performed, and, of course, consumed in its many different…lives.
Ask the Instructor: Dr. Aoise Stratford
Why did you elect to offer this course at Cornell this year?
What I think is potentially really useful about this course is that it looks at texts across a bunch of mediums, periods, and genres. We look at big budget Hollywood films, early television, indie films, short stories, a ballet, a news article, a nineteenth century melodrama — all kinds of things! And we also use a lot of different critical lenses: feminist theories of theatre, for example, queer theory, psychoanalysis, as well as looking at texts that explore the figure of the vampire and its relationship to postcolonialism, the Gothic, and race in America.
I think this broad approach is really helpful for students wanting to explore both what it might mean to study comparatively across a wide range of texts, disciplines and theories and to learn a little about a lot of things, while focusing on one of our most pervasive and pliable cultural myths. I offered this course mostly as an introduction both to an interesting figure and more importantly to a wide range of tools for reading it.
Is Performing Death and Desire: Vampires on Stage and Screen offered within the department at Cornell in which you usually teach?
Yes, it is offered through PMA, where I live, if you like, but it is cross-listed with FGSS. Gender and sexuality are key concerns with vampires and shape their narratives across all the platforms we encounter them.
What do you ultimately hope that your students take away from participating in Vampires on Stage and Screen?
One of the things I do in this class is encourage students to engage with the texts creatively. So yes, we write essays in this class (a comparative one and an argument paper) but we also explore the narratives as creators. Last time I taught this class I had several students write short screenplay excerpts, one student do a lighting design for one of the plays we read, and another composed an original song based on Dracula.
One of the things I hope students take away is an understanding of (and appreciation for) the artistic process and an ability to use that process to deepen analysis and explore intellectual curiosity. We don’t just study vampires, we try to make them or bring them to life (if you like) and then examine the choices that went in to doing so. But I also hope students come out of the class with a better understanding of (or in many cases introduction to) a lot of different ways of looking at performance texts and an appreciation for the ways in which those texts are constructions that can tell us about cultural values and anxieties and are always socially situated.
As Veronica Hollinger says, “the vampire is the monster that looks like us,” so in a sense, this class is really about people and the social systems, institutions, groups, and power structures within which they move — or can’t.
If you could teach a course on any topic at all, what would it be?
Vampires, of course! Because they are still with us. We’re not over them yet which means there must be more left to explore and more left to learn.
NEXT: #4: Let it Rock: The Rolling Stones, Writing and Creativity
We’re highlighting seventeen of the most innovative university courses offered this academic year. For the full list of courses, click here.
