Gender, Genre and Dracula: Joan Copjec and “Vampire Fiction”

Abstract

This article critiques a certain psychoanalytic approach both to the genre of “Vampire Fiction” and the “anxiety” it induces. Joan Copjec’s claim is that these are founded on “nothing”, genre and affect being defined by the “overwhelming presence of the real”, for which all “interpretation […] is superfluous and inappropriate.” It follows that Copjec does not understand the encounter with “the real” staged within Dracula through the words on the page, genre and affect being located instead of either within the bare bones of the textual structure or in an unreadable “aura” surrounding the text. This article counters this understanding through a focus on precise textual formulations within Dracula. It begins by reading in detail linguistic constructions of gendered identities, and the identity “child”; moves to question Copjec’s wider claim that genre transcends textual considerations; and closes with a comparative analysis of Dracula and Rousseau’s Émile, a text that Copjec takes to be its “precise equivalent”, but not because of language. What is finally at stake in this article is whether a detailed engagement with language can be jettisoned when considering constructions of genre and gender. It argues that reintroducing textuality problematises Copjec’s arguments, and the empty identities upon which they are founded.

On the Tolerance of Children’s Literature Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Neighborliness, and Pooh

“…For an account of Lacanian thought that would be critical of my own, but also would both qualify issues of the Symbolic and the Real in the work of the critics named above, and point to the difficulty of Rudd claiming his 'framework' to be in any sense 'Lacanian', see Eyers (2012). For my own critiques of Žižekian Lacanianism, see Cocks (2015Cocks ( , 2020aCocks ( , 2020bCocks ( , 2021Cocks ( , 2023.…”