Several weeks ago, I wrote about my interdisciplinary class reading And the Band Played On, and the resulting discussion. The second book I have assigned this semester is the 1897 novel Dracula. We wanted to have a book that was made into at least two different video productions. The students in the senior class (the one paired with my introductory class) are starting tomorrow running Dracula films on Sunday afternoons, and leading an associated discussion; those in my class are to attend at least two of the screenings, but I would not be surprised if many went to more than the minimum. After all, Dracula is a pretty good read and they have had a lot of interesting things to say in the discussion.
Follow me below the winding Transylvanian mountain road for more.
As with And the Band Played On, the adoption of Dracula was a shared decision by the two of us teaching the introductory and capstone courses. My colleague is in Film Studies and for a fictional text she wanted to have a story that had been made into at least two different filmed treatments. My primary criterion (other than I wanted the second book to be fiction) was that I wanted to have a science fiction story. In my experience including speculative fiction has encouraged students to think into the future in a way that sometimes is more effective than a nonfiction narrative.
The discussions in this spring's class got started off in the right way with the first book, and by the time we got to Dracula, everyone in the class knew each other and for the most part did not hesitate to jump into the discussion fray. I randomly assigned students to lead the discussion, and gave them two or three potential questions to discuss, but they seldom needed those prompts. The conversation usually developed naturally in ways that I had not expected.
There are many ways in which this horror story is easily connected with students' modern experiences. The vampire and his homeland are treated as exotic, backwards, and not "one of us" even when they come to our own country. There is a sense that women are naïve and should be kept that way, that if they have any knowledge of sex or express any desire of their own (like Lucy, who writes her friend Mina "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?"), they will end up as fallen women, if not simply evil. But on the other hand there is a woman in the book, Mina, who has a clear sense of agency. She is not a victim of Dracula, and she has an identity apart from that of her husband, including a profession (she is a teacher and, it is implied, will manage her husband's law office when they settle into that future path).
One of the most interesting discussions was about whether the book was scary in today's world. The Puerto Rican student talked about the fear his mother had of the chupacabra that was said to be around their town in which he grew up. The rational intersected with the legendary and he was forbidden from playing outside in the early 1990s. We make out own decisions about what is frightening. For some people, the original film "Halloween" is frightening because we know nothing about the character of Jason. For others in the class it was because of the relentlessness of the attacks.
They discussed anti-Semitism and whether (and in what ways) reading this book during and after the Holocaust, which included assaults on the Slavs and other eastern peoples as well as Jews, would have been a substantially different experience. And there was an entertaining excursion into whether the storms that Dracula could conjure would be taken as examples of climate change, and how the wolves associated with him could show the repopulation of the European continent with rare animals.
The students are very socially-aware, with more of those who have a desire and plan to improve the world than is usual in other of my classes. They had a lot to say about the social status of the count, and why it might have helped the English accept his oddness. Were his activities done by someone who did not have his wealth, would they have been simply accepted as slightly exotic rather than creepy.
For the novel this year, I wanted to have science fiction, in part because I enjoyed the results of last year's book's discussion and papers. Last year I used World War Z, and for the accompanying paper they were to write a piece of speculative fiction -- an interview and/or a record with their future selves after the zombie apocalypse. This year's written assignment was to utilize the epistolary format of the novel and write a letter home to someone about the vampire suspected of being in our town. I am sorry that I had set it as a written letter, as students asked if they could use tweets to write it, and if there is a next time I might well do so, asking them to set up twitter accounts in which to write their stories. So keep an eye open for a series of "this is the vampire we have around here" twitter feeds. That might be me and my students. In the meantime, on Tuesday I will get hand-written letters from the students in a few days, letters written on onion skin air letter paper I ordered for just this purpose. My ulterior motive is that they should be writing letters instead of just sending emails. Getting something in the mail can be really exciting. I dream they will make their families very happy by writing them a letter or three, even if the subject is "My professor is a vampire!"
This is the last year of the three year rotation and I will be sorry to see this class disappearing from my teaching for a few years. It has been a lot of fun to teach, and I think the students are getting a lot out of it. I certainly have.