Extended Literary Analysis Paper: I am confident in the paper Vampires and Humanity in and through Time I wrote for Interview with the Vampire. I feel that the topic of vampires as a metaphor is one worth exploring, and might even be fun, especially with all the Twilight and many more pieces of vampire entertainment about us. I would like to take this opportunity to become an educated viewer and get something deeper out my experience than just a good story. Anyways, in my first paper, I explored the possibilities of immortality and vampirism, what time means for immortals, and the search for truth and origin. In the final project I would dig further into the topic of time for vampires while applying them to the time/generation of the book's publication. In other words, vampires are a metaphor for issues of the time that the vampire book was published. To do this effectively, I would reference the works of The Postmodern Condition, Simulacra and Simulation, and Tendencies. These works on postmodern views and ways of thinking are what was going on at the time of Interview with the Vampire. A quote that I would like to use: "there are important senses in which "queer" can signify only when attached to the first person. ... to make the description "queer" a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person". (Tendencies) I think this quote would be a good one to look at what Interview points out about thought. From Interview, Armand says, "is this th eonly power that obsesses you, so that yo must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power there exists is inside ourselves?" (237). The two quotes relate to each other because they refer to true meaning, or the purest source of information and thoughts.
To emphasize how the vampire is a metaphor for the time it was introduced I would also bring in Dracula and talk about it's metaphor to Britain, Victorian times and views. A most valuable resource for this part of the paper would be the literary analysis The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. I like that it talks about a variety of things. For instance, vampires being indicative of a country's ruin. The metaphor is that British appearance in a country means "game over". The analysis also talks about how vampires take over and transform their victims' "personal identities... cultural, political, and racial selves" (465). This is getting at the metaphor of colonization being a mix between the country and britain, but to really exploit this idea a quote about the "mother" vampire and it's child vampire interracting should be used. I should also look into the other analyses to see if there are any more historical accounts of Britain's views, politics or other relevant issues.
Through both novels, this would also be a good opportunity to see how each time viewed women, their place, and their rights. To do this I would examine how women interracted, responded and related to the vampire, which is a metaphor for the time and, in both novels, a man vampire. The same idea goes for gay or lesbian views in both novels.
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kindling, there's a word that I would like for you to explore which is "temporality." Many postmodern theorists say that in our contemporary world, we experience "time" much differently. History is something that we can revise or just forget, and the future seems always in the present. In other words, we exist in a world where concepts of time are no longer "linear"--there was a beginning, middle, and an end--but in a world that seems all jumbled up together in some bizarre collage. Actually we can use the medium of the collage as a useful metaphor for the postmodern experience of temporality. Think of the character of Louis NOT as a vampire, but as a metaphor for the postmodern condition in terms of the contemporary experience of time.
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