ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This session grows out of the current debate about what does and does not constitute the human in the 21st century. In the current context of the complexity of medical innovation and research, the ways of remaking and repairing military casualties, and the debates about what constitutes the normal or normative in terms both of human bodies and human psyches, this session proposes a broadly comparative approach. Given the obsession with the vampire around 1900 and in our current age, it tracks the limits of the definition of the human in the context of these modern debates and the earlier fascination of the super-predator, the vampire. It seeks to locate this orientalist and gothic archetype at the cross-roads of cultural anxieties, be they intra- or inter-cultural, imperial or post-colonial. The session will interrogate what is entailed ontologically as well as aesthetically and culturally by this atavistic and notorious complement to other variations on the human.

Friday, March 24

Peter Chapin, Iona College
“Dracula’s Trance Formations”
Gregory Erickson, Mannes College
“In Mina Harker’s Bedroom: Dracula, Writing, and the Construction of (Post)Modern Theology”
Jonathan Steinwand, Concordia College
“Who’s Afraid of Mina Harker? Vampires, Slayers, and Textual Power”
Narcisz Fejes, Case Western Reserve University
“The Vampire and His Land: Representations of Transylvania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”

Saturday, March 25

Holt Meyer, University of Erfurt
“The murder was the work of a Slovak”: Comparative Ethnic Readings and Vampire Forensics in Stoker’s Dracula”
Jillian St. Jacques, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam
“Sexual Darkness: On Vampirism and National Paranoia”
Leah Feldman, University of Texas at Austin
“Resurrected dinners: the infinite oralities of Gogol, Chekhov, and Proust”
Dragan Kujundzic, University of Florida at Gainesville
“vEmpire”

Sunday, March 26

Andrea Bachner, Harvard University
“Nurturing Perversion: Reconfiguring Intersubjective Transmission in Recent Chinese Literature and Art”
Vojislava Filipcevic, Columbia University
“Urban Anxieties: Trajectories and Transformations of Cinematic Identities from F.W. Murnau to Robert Siodmak”
Shiladitya Sen, Temple University
“The Jew as Vampire in Jud Suss”
Monica Popescu, McGill University
“Vampires of the Potted Jungle: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber”