For a retired English professor, Elizabeth Miller keeps some rather interesting company. In fact, you’ll often find her curled up with a vampire-well, at least a novel featuring those blood-sucking creatures of the night.
You see, Miller teaches a course called The Literary Vampire at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies. The unorthodox class, which focuses wholly on the study of vampiric lore through the ages and from across the world, was offered through the school for the first time this fall.
After a distinguished career studying English literature ranging from Romanticism to British Gothic, Miller jumped at the chance to teach a course all about vampires, seeing how prevalent they are in the canons of writing. And since the course was being offered through Continuing Studies, with no marks, exams, or credit value, only those with a keen interest in the subject would likely sign up.
And indeed, the first batch of students taking the course were eager participants.
“Everyone really enjoyed it,” Miller enthuses. “This is what all classes should be like.”
But why vampires, and how do you structure an entire class around them? It’s actually not that hard, Miller explains: “Vampires or similar undead creatures exist in most cultures around the world, with each generation reinventing them based on their own social and cultural issues.
“There’s only so much you can do with a werewolf or a Frankenstein, but vampires possess a certain human element. Some are truly horrifying and repulsive, while some are much more romantic and sympathetic,” she notes.
Miller also points out that vampires allow us to examine ourselves through them. Vampire tales shine a light on the dark side of human nature-illuminating the hatred and ostracism often faced by ‘outsiders.’
Having read Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a young girl, Miller admits that she did not fully appreciate it for all that it represented.
“I pretty much read it as just another horror story,” she recalls. But upon re-reading it, Miller was fascinated by the breadth and depth of the story. She began studying the history of vampires in literature, to see where Stoker had garnered his ideas.
It was then that she discovered there was (despite the widespread public misconception) no stereotypical vampire, per se. Though most people believe that Dracula, the suave and charming eastern-European count, is the standard, this is in fact not always so.
“People often see a vampire as a metaphor for the times in which they live,” Miller explains. Whether it’s Dracula (derived from gentlemanly 19th-century conduct), the world-weary and decadent Lestat of Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles (who epitomizes the MTV generation of the 1980s), or the scheming metrosexual Deacon Frost of Blade fame (who himself was an updated version of an older character), vampires in literature are often tied to a particular era.
Miller argues that is precisely why the vampires continue to live on-or should that be “remain undead”-in pop culture, because they are able to transcend the antiquated archetype.
“There will always be another book or movie [featuring vampires] coming out,” she reflects.
With the course now over (it was a short fall session), Miller is off to advise the Royal Winnipeg Ballet on their upcoming production of Dracula, which she calls “a classic example of how vampires continue to evolve.”
It’s not yet known whether The Literary Vampire will be offered again next year, but Miller says she would love to teach it again.
“People love exploring the world of monsters as it is,” she notes, “but vampires are monsters with character.”
