[
Wesleyan Home Page
] [
WesMaps Home Page
]
[
Course Search
] [
Course Search by CID
]
In the first volume of CAPITAL, published in 1867, Marx writes that "capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself . . . . Capital . . ., vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more it sucks" (342). Thirty years later Bram Stoker's DRACULA, the famous vampire from Transylvania, comes to life. Why does Marx use a Gothic simile to characterize the workings of capital, and why do Stoker's vampires (to say nothing of Anne Rice's) still entrance readers? Gothicism is an eighteenth-century literary mode, yet it has a spectral second life in late nineteenth-century England and is not dead yet. How does "the Gothic" come to be a distinct mode, and how is it revived by the Victorians? What might t he Gothic, which in its various forms is contemporaneous with the rise and triumph of capitalism, have to do with this revolutionary economic system? We will read Gothic novels and other texts of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to learn not only about this long-lived literary mode, but also to address large questions about the relation of the literary to the economic.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL Grading Mode: Student Option
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-24-2000
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459