Vampires and Zombies Reborn
“Cursed By a Bite”, by Matt Kaplan from the book Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters (2012), explores the history of vampires and zombies and how they relate to actual events. This paper will show the effectiveness of the author’s use ethos, pathos, and logos and how the text fulfills its purpose for a historical and scientific audience. Throughout this paper the reader is shown how effective Matt Kaplan’s text Cursed By a Bite is.
Matt Kaplan’s text is for an audience that is interested in a scientific explanation of the origins of mythical monsters with the use of historical context. Some of the historical context in the text Cursed By a Bite includes when Kaplan references the plague that spread through Europe, the history of garlic in many cultures, and historical accounts of cases of rabies. The audience is
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For instance, Matt Kaplan studied the sciences at MIT and folklore at Harvard. He has also written articles for the National Geographic, Nature, New Scientist and the Economist. Kaplan has also published a book called Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters (2012) where he investigated the origins of many mythical creatures using history and biochemistry. Furthermore, he uses credible and scholarly sources for many examples in his text of Cursed By a Bite. For example, he uses sources from Zora Neale Hurston, a student of the noted anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University to explain in detail about the zombies in Haiti. Not to mention, Kaplan also uses Harvard ethno biologist Edmund Wade Davis to explore more into the scientific study of how poisons were being used in Haiti to make living zombies. These are just a few of the ways Kaplan uses ethos to support his theory of the origins of vampires and
The Kiss v. Gnaw “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see” (Edgar Degas). There are hundreds of artworks in progress right now, all around the world, and every single one of these pieces have a common goal, as all art does, which is to communicate. An artist aspires to express themselves and their ideas to others through their work, therefore every piece they make tends to have some underlying, or obvious, meaning for their viewer to interpret. The Kiss and Gnaw share the same goal as well.
The four pieces of literature to be compared in this comparison are Dracula by Bram Stoker, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola, Nosferatu (1922) by F.W. Murnau, and Dracula (1931) by Tod Browning. In these works of fiction, there are answers to what it would have felt like to be a vampire, what it would have felt like to have a vampire in one’s life,
Death stalks around every corner, in cruel and unusual ways. People tend to be drawn to folk tales of deadly creatures. Origins of stories are often exaggerated, and not completely true. For example, when people look back at the story ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ people think that it originates from Texas, but the story actually originated in Massachusetts. While some have heard of Edward Gein, the Black Dahlia and John Wayne Gacy, people do not realize that many scary stories are inspired by actual killers or their victims.
The bubonic plague caused widespread panic and fear as people struggled to make sense of this new and deadly disease. Similarly, unreliable narrators challenge readers' assumptions about what is real and what is not, forcing them to question their own perception of
In her essay “Zombies as a Metaphor for Society” Sabrina Student attempts to discuss the history and evolution of zombie-based entertainment and the social implications of this pop culture icon. According to Student, zombies are an effective storytelling vehicle to discuss societal issues at key points in American history. Careful reading of Student’s paper reveals many faults in her documentation of information sources, and a troubling lack of competency in Modern Language Association (MLA) style. Student’s page formatting, in-text citations, and the Works Cited page all contain errors ranging from minor punctuation mistakes to serious breaches of information integrity.
Vampire Bat Controversy Vampire bats are in the middle of a controversy that could either kill or save them. Firstly, many cattlemen think that vampire bats should be exterminated. For example, Los Angeles journalist, Chris Kraul, shares how cattleman, Francisco Oliva struggles with vampire bats. Oliva, after surveying, notices that a majority of his herd of 300 cattle had blood stains and fang marks. Francisco Oliva states that “He would exterminate every bat if he could” (Kraul).
The essay “Vampires Never Die” By Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan tells vampires historical, scientific and literature roots. They have the historical beginning of vampires. Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan also go through the literature history of vampires. The historical roots are far and deep.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, tells the story of a vampire that preys on the blood of people to gain nourishment and replenish his health from the lack thereof. Dracula is a character that much like any other vampire tale, chooses victims that are easily manipulated or are easy to lure into his vicious cycle of blood sucking and neck biting. The story of Dracula criticizes gender roles, social statuses, and ideologies that are within members of a society. There is great emphasis placed on the idea of ideologies and how this fundamental notion shapes the reality of the characters in the story. To further explain this, it is important to mention that Louis Althusser, a French philosopher, modified Karl Marx’s theories of base and superstructures, in
In “Dracula”, vampires are seen as the “other” in society. While Count Dracula is quite striking to us in various ways, embodying many human ideals and desires such a power and immortality, he can be viewed as an “other” and is separate from human society. Not only is Dracula a foreigner, but he is powerfully sexual, with disturbing and unpleasant eating habits ,and is also quite possibly “the devil incarnate” (Marigny e) Count is further separated from society by the fact that he is un-dead – an unnatural state that presents good reason for terror all by itself. All these attributes paint him as contrary to Western norms and values, and he was therefore uniquely effective at provoking revulsion and can be seen as an object of horror.
In the biography “ Dracula Prince Of Many Faces-His Life And TImes,” by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, the authors try to piece together a mysterious time period in Transylvanian history and analyze who “Dracula,” also known as “Vlad The Impaler,” truly was in his life and what atrocities he committed. One of the most interesting facts that can be drawn from the book is dracula’s second most preferred torture method, trap doors, “which he used to drop wretches cunningly on the stakes below”[Florescu, McNally, 105]. Along with intricate artwork that was included in the book, the authors used; his personality, the state of his current realm, and even went as far as to provide accounts of the intricate methods of torture, my personal
Throughout the excerpt from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stoker utilizes diction to convey the central idea that peoples’ worst fears lie in the unknown. In this section, the narrator is being held captive by an unknown entity. He begins to feel that his only hope is to understand the captor and starts to question the manner of the individual. In an effort to express the central idea, Stoker employs diction.
Bram Stoker, describes one of the verbal taboos of the Victorian era, violence, through the representation of vampires as “monsters” through the point of view of their victims in his novel Dracula. Stoker portrays violence in three distinct categories- physical, visual and psychological. Each one of these categories is described by one of the antagonists in the Novel, with Count Dracula as the physical aspect of violence, his underlings, the female vampires as the visual and Renfield, the patient at Dr. Seward’s mental asylum, as the psychological aspect of violence. This essay looks at the portrayal of such Categorical violence as different renditions of a “monster” and considers why Stoker would segregate violence in such a manner.
Doubtless he created a model for the classical vampire which was developed by the ages. In 21st century Stephanie Meyer composed a romantic book using modificated vamp creatures. Mixture of classical personality of the villain and born in her dream figures of perfection. Described earlier differences present how vampires changed during time. In spite of all I cannot deny both ‘Dracula’ and ‘Twilight’ turned out to be World phenomenon.
Gothic horror novel Dracula, the title character makes only several relatively short appearances, some of which are while in disguise. Throughout the novel, Stoker keeps Count Dracula in the shadows, both literally and figuratively. This essay will describe these appearances and analyze Stoker’s use of them to determine what effect they might have on the impression of the character and the novel overall. It will be claimed that by keeping his title character hidden for much of the novel, Stoker’s Dracula is made much more frightening to the reader. Human beings tend to fear the unknown, and by leaving Dracula to the imagination,
His artery throbs with a mixture of fear and desire; his instincts are strong, he is aware of the perilousness of this place and yet he choses to ignore it, such an imprudent, rash, scrumptious meat. He has such a fine throat, enough to satisfy her hunger, our hunger. Her mouth waters, she cannot escape her nature, we won’t let her escape her nature; her claws that are sharpened to perfection like a samurai’s sword and teeth that are made from the fangs of a snake, hover inches from the meat’s neck; those are the weapons she will use to tear him apart from limb to limb while howling like it is the time of winter solstice itself. But, she quivers, the same horrible disinclination to her role like a prey captured because of her nature; she doesn’t want to be what she is. The girl a disgrace to all vampires, because she starves, yet she