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Dr. Benita Blessing |
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022A Scott Quad Ohio University Athens, Ohio 45701 Phone: 593-2681 Fax: 597-2707 E-mail: cte@ohio.edu |
Monsters have been key figures in both oral and written accounts since ancient times. The emergence of vampire stories reached a new level with the nineteenth-century Bram Stoker novel, Dracula, and a multitude of stories and films have kept the legend, if not the man, more alive than ever in the over hundred years since the book’s publication. In this course, we will explore the reasons for modern society’s fascination with the vampire myth. Our sources will include novels, historical accounts on which Dracula was based, films, and literature from present-day self-proclaimed vampires. Issues we will explore include race, ethnicity, gender, and the construction and function of fear. Primarily a cultural history course, we will also draw on methodologies from gender studies, anthropology, and film studies.
This course is a history of sexuality through the lens of individual memoirs. How have people constructed themselves sexually in the modern period? There are interesting differences and similarities between male and female accounts historically, but those non-traditional categories – intersexuals (hermaphrodites), homosexual , bisexual, transgender/sexual, and non-White authors – call into question our understanding of how humans have become sexual over time. Have these memoirs and diaries, sometimes private, sometimes public, changed over the past two centuries, suggesting a new self-understanding of the authors’ sexualities? By using primary and secondary sources that explore individual sexuality, this course seeks to present a history of the modern era as a history of changing sexual identities. |
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