-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of joanna bujes Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 11:43 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] RE: lynching
> In the case of vampires, I'm with you and I urge everyone to read
Stoker's "Dracula" because the book is a much more transparent case of
projection than the Hollywood mythology that followed. I find it
fascinating, in any case, that just at the moment when the Brits were
about to suck some Romanian blood (oil), they discovered that a Romanian
"vampire" threatened the lifeblood of its British subjects and the
chastity of its women.
** I think I've been unknowingly channelling Joanna this past semester. I had my students read Dracula alongside Douglas's Purity and Danger for my Evil course... pointing out that the entire ad for the terrorist narrative since Sept. 2001 is essentially a repeat of the basic plot of Stoker's Dracula... which elegantly transforms and simplifies morally complex questions and problems into basic purity regulations: clean and unclean, impurity = danger (see Douglas's chapter on internal lines for details). A solitary creature from the east travels west and brings a plague of strange events... the powers of the west align technology, reason, faith, science, and capital against the monster and drive it back east...
ken