In May, 2003, the “Monsters and the Monstrous” series of symposia was launched in Budapest under the title “Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil.” This conference, which brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and academic backgrounds, was part of the “At the Interface” project, organized by Dr. Robert Fisher (www.inter-disciplinary.net), to allow scholars to cross-pollinate their ideas across a variety of academic frontiers. Three years later, Rodopi published the volume from this conference, number 28, of their “At the Interface” series of books, which to date is up to number 44. This context of production, however, required some research to discover (mostly on-line), as nowhere in the actual volume I was reviewing is this context explained. In fact, I would not have even known this book was the result of a conference, if one of my colleagues was not a contributor; although reading the book, I certainly had my suspicions.
Vampires is a difficult book to review: several of the fifteen chapters are excellent, and the tremendous scholarship reflected in those articles is deserving of praise. On the flipside, the book’s editor, Peter Day, and the publisher, Rodopi, need to be condemned for producing a sloppy and unprofessional volume. Not only is there no mention that this volume is a proceedings of a conference, but no list of contributors is produced so that we can see which discipline each contributor comes from. Of course, one could argue that such is the ideology of “At the Interface,” that they are presenting “scholarship” regardless of the discipline and regardless of who is writing the pieces, from seasoned and experienced professors to new graduate students.
Represented in Vampires are articles from literary studies, linguistics, history, legal studies, religious studies, cultural studies, film and television studies, but alas no folklorists, at least not explicitly so. Alan Dundes is cited frequently, but that is probably due to his 1998 publication of The Vampire: A Casebook. Norrine Dresser’s American Vampires (1990) is never cited, but one paper (Meg Barker’s “Vampire Subcultures”) at least cites David Hufford’s work on the “old hag” (1976, 1982). Phil Bagust’s chapter, “Vampire Dogs and Marsupial Hyenas: Fear, Myth and the Tasmanian Tiger’s Extinction,” makes an intriguing connection between vampire lore and the Hispanic tradition of “el Chupacabra” (93-105). The highly esteemed Dracula specialist, Elizabeth Miller, in her contribution titled “Getting to Know the Un-dead: Bram Stoker, Vampires and Dracula” (3-19), explores some of Stoker’s source materials, including vampire folklore, through a consideration of the Irish writer’s notes. And despite needing some recognition of Hufford’s work, Darren Oldridge’s “‘Dead Man Walking’: The Historical Context of Vampire Beliefs” (81-91) is an excellent, Geertzian piece on folk belief.
What is particularly frustrating about Vampires is that, despite the ideology of the “At the Interface” project, none of the contributors seems to have learnt from one another; or rather, such cross-pollination is never demonstrated in these papers. In fact, with chapters running between ten to fifteen pages each, including some extensive notes and bibliographies, it does not appear that much post-conference revision has been done to these papers (this lack of revision is verified by my colleague who contributed to the book, at least in that case). Day’s volume then is not so much an edited collection of inter-disciplinary scholarship on the vampire, but a quickly collected scattering of conference papers, unrevised and non-reflective. Surely I’m not the only one who attends conferences like this one appeared to be, in order to learn from colleagues in other fields; but the myopia of perspectives in each of the chapters indicates that contributors were more focused on their own papers than on the inter-disciplinary coming-together that such an event is about.
And for every interesting piece of research done, for example by Stacey Abbott (“Embracing the Metropolis: Urban Vampires in American Cinema of the 1980s and 90s” [125-142]) or Elizabeth McCarthy (“‘Death to Vampires!’: The Vampire Body and the Meaning of Mutilation” [189-208]), there are self-indulgent exercises in theoretical self-justification, such as James Tobias’ “The Vampire and the Cyborg Embrace: Affect Beyond Fantasy in Virtual Materialism” (159-175), which attempts to yoke theories of transgendered and transethnic identities to vampirism, or the Zizekian/Lacanian exploration of the self in Fiona Peters’ “Looking in the Mirror: Vampires, the Symbolic and the Thing” (177-187). In both of these cases, the papers read as if vampirism was a tacked-on afterthought and the authors suddenly recalled what they were supposed to be writing about on the plane on the way to the Hungarian conference.
It is a pity that scholars like Tobias and Peters chose not to better revise their papers a) for publication in general and b) in the wake of what they might have learnt from the other speakers. But it is inexcusable for editors like Day and publishers like Rodopi to allow these papers through without substantial revision. Despite excellent work in this volume by Miller, Oldridge, Bagust, Barker, Abbott, and McCarthy, Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, a book where only forty percent of the contributions are worth the effort, is hardly required reading. Furthermore, I am sure that these six papers will be revised and published elsewhere. The bigger problem for me is that, as an introduction to the “At the Interface” program and its specific research project on “Monsters and the Monstrous” (www.wickedness.net), this volume is a poor advertisement for the group. Normally, such a research project would have been something I would have leapt to be part of, but based on the sloppiness of Day’s book and Rodopi’s lack of professional editing, I wouldn’t want to be associated with this team.
Works Cited
Dresser, Norrine. American Vampires: Fans, Victims and Practitioners. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Dundes, Alan ed. The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Hufford, David J. “A new approach to the ‘Old Hag’: The nightmare tradition re-examined” in American Folk Medicine: A Symposium. Edited by Wayland Hand. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, 73-85.
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[Review length: 1014 words • Review posted on January 30, 2008]