In English 215, exploring the ‘other’ through vampires, wolf men

Samantha Foster
Staff Writer

Those blood sucking demons which we have all come to either love or hate over the past few years are a frequent topic of discussion in one VCU English class.

Vampires were first written about in English in John William Polidori’s 1819 short story, “The Vampyre.” Later examples of vampires in literature include the classics, such as “Carmilla” and “Dracula,” all of which are read and analyzed in John Brinegar’s English 215 class.

Brinegar has taught English at VCU for 13 years, although most of those classes did not stretch far beyond the classic Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Brinegar’s course, entitled Monsters and the Monstrous, discusses the various monsters within literature. Monsters and the Monstrous has been offered occasionally since 2009.

The class’s exact title has changed several times to meet its ever-changing curriculum. Last semester, the course was entirely focused on vampire literature. This semester, the class tracks many different types of monster literature, as well as the vampire.

“The ‘Twilight’ books are very popular, and yes, we have read those, but then we also read more classic literature,” Brinegar said.

The class was inspired out of a desire to attract people who would not normally be interested in analyzing pieces of literature. Vampire and monster books are excellent ways to get people interested in 19th century English literature, Brinegar said.

“(The students) are reading great 19th century novels,” Brinegar said. “They are reading ‘Dracula’ and ‘Carmilla,’ and you can talk about the same sort of things with a Dickens novel.”

“I get people in the class who are interested in vampire books, and I get a lot of people who didn’t know or didn’t care about vampire books, but leave saying ‘Hey, I didn’t know that there was so much to learn about vampire books’,” Brinegar said.

“Analyzing texts is the most amazing thing ever,” said freshman theater major Jessica Skiles. “I find it very fun, and when I saw this class I thought that sounded badass.”

Within the class, monsters are defined as being “Other with a capital ‘O’,” Skiles said. This is those who do not fall into social or human norms. A monster is also described as being superhuman, preying on humans and not living among humans.

Vampires, though, have recently taken on the connotation of being strong, sexy, having eternal life and being sparkly.

“I dropped a lot of the more popular vampire books, like ‘Twilight,’ because not a lot actually happens in ‘Twilight,’ Brinegar said. “It’s a 600-page book, but there isn’t a lot of event. It’s a lot of teenage angst.”

Despite the very recent rise in the popularity of vampires, they are already beginning to fall out of style, Brinegar said.

“They are no longer new and exciting. They have been around too long,” Skiles said. “Ask anyone who has never read a ‘Twilight’ book, and they will tell you they hate it. The cool thing to do is to dislike ‘Twilight,’ and ‘Twilight’ is synonymous with vampires.”

With the vampire vogue fading, the question becomes what the next monster will be. For Skile’s guess: “the wolf man.”