The Vampire Lectures - Softcover

Rickels, Laurence A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816633924 ISBN 13: 9780816633920

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1999

Synopsis

Bela Lugosi may -- as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang -- be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the profound and unconscious appeal of the undead.

Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects Rickels's unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory's use of girls' blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker's Dracula, with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau's haunting Nosferatu; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as Subspecies. He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources.

More than simply a compilation of vampire lore, however, The Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical arguments -- particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche -- embeddedin vampirism and gothic literature.

About this title

About the Author

Laurence A. Rickels is professor of art and theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Germany, and Sigmund Freud Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

From Publishers Weekly

Since 1986, Rickels, a specialist in German literature and psychoanalytic theory (Aberrations of Mourning), has been giving vampire lectures at UC-Santa Barbara. He developed this "course load of auto-stimulation" to interest students in FreudAin particular, in his psychoanalytic treatment of mourning. The course was not an instant success, but 10 years later, it's standing room only. What appears here is, according to Rickels, "between reading/writing and the propagandistic talking of teaching." From embalming practices to pop culture, Rickels draws on every possible vampire metaphor to make his points. Claiming (dubiously) that the occult dates from the onset of technology, he calls vampire tales the "afterimage" of technological innovation. In his first "lecture," Rickels discusses Stoker, Rice, sexology and Vlad the Impaler to show that there are four distinct histories of vampirism. Many chapters focus on contemporary contributions such as "Buffy, Near Dark Salem Lot," while some dissect obscure works such as Guy de Maupassant's The Horla (a tale about a malevolent invisible force). Rickels even throws in shlock filmmaker Ed Wood. Yet he returns repeatedly to Stoker's Dracula to illustrate our psychodynamic reality, filled with death wishes, erotic substitution and symbolic meanings. The central problem is the analysis. Perhaps Rickels is trying to mimic teenage jargon, but his insights often come out as a convoluted blend of academic affectation and pop interpretation. For example, to explain why the university is the perfect place for his "Freudo-vampiric intervention," he describes it as "the heartbeat-later fleshing and flushing out of the emerging techno externalizations of what Freud would analyze as internal psychic mechanisms." While this book offers a sophisticated survey of vampire culture, most readers wouldn't want to be taking notes. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0816633924
• ISBN 13: 9780816633920
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384