CULTURAL STUDIES - OF REVENANTS AND MAN-SUCKERS: TOWARDS A CULTURAL THEORY OF VAMPIRISM

Specialization / Direction

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

The discourse theorist Michel Foucault argued that every era brings forth its own “privileged monster” – the Middle Ages the wild man, the Renaissance the Siamese twin. The vampire, however, enjoys an unusually long life: it wanders from the Enlightenment through industrialization into our post-capitalist present. Moreover, it is a being of contradictions: both dead and alive, bloodless and overfilled, human and animal, eternally young and centuries old. In this seminar, we encounter this hybrid creature across a wide range of high and popular cultural narratives and media. The vampire haunts literature – from folk legends and Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula to stories by Papadiamantis, Antonis Travlantonis, and Dana Grigorcea’s contemporary novel Die nicht sterben (They Do Not Die). At the same time, it takes shape in the imagery of cinema, from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) to Coppola’s postmodern phantasmagoria of bloodsuckers and the melancholic teenage vampires of the 2000s. Our particular focus is on the economic as well as the geo- and biopolitical imaginaries embodied by the vampire. By following this monster from its “birthplace” Greece to the heart of Europe and back again, we will examine the shifting expressions of a capitalist “monsterology”: the uncanny face of class, colonial, and migration societies. Ultimately, we will ask whether, after capitalism, one might imagine entirely different forms of living together – a new politics beyond ancestry, bloodlines, and monstrous hierarchies.

18-09-2025