Related Papers
THESIS CALL OF CTHULHU AND VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: INVOCATION, SPATIALITY, AND RITUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN TWO TABLETOP ROLE-PLAYING GAMES Submitted by
2015 •
Tyler Brunette Brunette
CALL OF CTHULHU AND VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: INVOCATION, SPATIALITY, AND RITUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN TWO TABLETOP ROLE-PLAYING GAMES In 1974 the world's first Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TRPG) was published, Dungeons and Dragons. Since that time hundreds of TRPGs have been published in multiple genres. In this thesis I explore the rhetoric of two of the most popular horror-themed TRPGs: Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade. I focus on explaining how these games came to be, how they serve their players as equipment for living, how they rhetorically (re)construct real-world places and spaces, and finally, how they encourage transcendence and jamming through ritual play and participation. This thesis hopefully helps to show the complex multi-layered rhetoric taking place in a relatively ignored form of media. Additionally, I introduce the concept of textual invocation as a complimentary theoretical construct to that of textual poaching as an explanation for how players and design...
Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity
Sacrificial Scripts, Blood Values and Gender in the Twilight Vampire Narrative
2000 •
Grietje Dresen
Speaking of Mysteries: Atonement in Teenage Fantasy Books
Anne Van Gend
The question of how we can speak of a transcendent God and God’s relationship with creation has been pondered for millennia. Today particular difficulties arise when communicating Christian atonement theories to a generation for whom the world of the Bible is increasingly foreign, and in a time when theologians and philosophers are questioning both the violence of some atonement theories and the existence of “superior transcendence.” This study explores the presence of biblical motifs in the stories of atonement in young adult fantasy works. It suggests that the use of these motifs to make sense of atonement within fantasy worlds may assist readers to make sense of the same motifs when they are used to portray the Christian story of atonement. The investigation begins by discussing the place of imagination, reason and transcendence in religious language and argues for the centrality of metaphor and myth in religious expression. It suggests that young people today still seek interme...
Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom A Very Special Vampire Episode : Vampires , archetypes , and postmodern turns in late-1980 s and ‘ 90 s cult TV shows
2017 •
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn
This article evaluates the importance of the TV vampire onscreen in science fiction, gothic, and horror-based cult TV series from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. The inclusion of the vampire as a peripheral character in series including Quantum Leap, The X-Files, Tales from the Crypt and Friday the 13: The Series indicates, in light of postmodern cultural turns, that there exists an imperative to re-evaluate, satirize and reflexively explore the vampire as a necessary and evolving stock gothic character within the narrative and generic frameworks of each show. In looking at these postmodern vampiric evaluations in their own right, where the vampire is featured as the ‘monster of the week’, this article argues that these understudied yet apposite representations of the television vampire, prior to and following on from the success of Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), documents a distinct cultural shift and maturation in representing vampires in non-vampire based gothic televi...
Migrations in Visual Art
2018 •
Jelena Erdeljan
Migrations in Visual Art is an edited collection of essays from different fields of humanities and social sciences that addresses the issue of the power and meaning of images and the visual in general in the context of migrations of people, ideas, knowledge, artifacts, art works and symbols through the prism of postcolonial and cultural translation theories, from antiquity to the present. The complex question of migrations in visual art involves far more than just art, all the more so because many fields in the humanities and social sciences have in recent times taken the “pictorial turn”. Moreover, and especially at this point in history, any discussion of the power of images and their role in migrations in visual culture is unavoidably also positioned in the context of current changes in global relations as well as in the growing impact of social media. This issue also opens the question of the de-territorialization of images and how, as Walter Benjamin had already indicated, technical reproduction has moved the artwork from its original context. The topics opened for interdisciplinary discussions at the conference and printed in this volume include the following: West Balkans - Migration and Cultural transfer, Migration as Cross-cultural Communication, Migration of Ideas and Concepts, Migration of Works of Art, and Migration of Symbols.
Vampires in the Sunburnt Country: Adapting Vampire Gothic to the Australian landscape
2007 •
Jason Nahrung
I first became enamoured with vampire Gothic after reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula in high school, but gradually became dissatisfied with the Australian adaptations of the sub-genre. In looking for examples of Australian vampire Gothic, a survey of more than 50 short stories, 23 novels and five movies made by Australians reveals fewer than half were set in an identifiably Australian setting. Even fewer make use of three key, landscape-related tropes of vampire Gothic – darkness, earth and ruins. Why are so few Australian vampire stories set in Australia? In what ways can the metaphorical elements of vampire Gothic be applied to the Sunburnt Country? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining examples of Australian vampire narratives, including film. Particular attention is given to Mudrooroo’s Master of the Ghost Dreaming series which, more than any other Australian novel, succeeds in manipulating and subverting the tropes of vampire Gothic. The process of adaptation of vampire Gothic to the Australian environment, both natural and man-made, is also a core concern of my own novel, Vampires’ Bane, which uses earth, darkness and a modern permutation of ruins to explore its metaphorical intentions. Through examining previous works and through my own creative process, Vampires’ Bane, I argue that Australia’s growing urbanisation can be juxtaposed against the vampire-hostile natural environment to enhance the tropes of vampire Gothic, and make Australia a suitable home for narratives that explore the ongoing evolution of Count Dracula and his many-faceted descendants.
Horror Studies
A very special vampire episode: Vampires, archetypes and postmodern turns in late 1980s’ and 1990s’ cult TV shows
2017 •
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn
Mithraism and Christianity.pdf
William S Abruzzi
Expanding out of Palestine and into the wider Roman world, Christian missionaries as early as Paul himself encountered a wide array of pagan beliefs and practices. However, as the Church became centered in Rome and strove to establish itself as the official religion of the empire, it had to compete with those forms of paganism that predominated in the very heart of the empire and that enjoyed official support. While several gods and their associated beliefs and rituals enjoyed official recognition, worship of the sun god in the form of Sol Invictus was later superseded during the third century CE by devotion to Mithras. As Christianity spread throughout the empire and became increasingly dominant in Rome itself, Mithraism formed the foundation of Roman paganism. It was, thus, with this religion that the emerging Roman Church had to most directly compete and against which it directed much of its anti-pagan hostility, while at the same time incorporating many of its beliefs and rituals. including placing the celebration of Jesus' virgin birth on December 25th.
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture
Let this Hell be Our Heaven: Richard Matheson's Spirituality and Its Hollywood Distortions
2012 •
Christopher Moreman
Paradigm Lost , Paradigm Found? Larger Theoretical Assumptions Behind Roger Beck’s TheReligionof theMithrasCult in theRomanEmpire
Aleš Chalupa
This article places Roger Beck’s book The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (Oxford 2006) into a larger context of various trends recognizable in the Mithraic scholarship especially since 1970’s of the 20th century. The article also raises theoretical and methodological questions concerning Beck’s “gateway text theory” originating from his choice of porphyry as the only Graeco-Roman source giving unambiguous information about the cult’s ideology and religious rationale. The final part of the article draws attention to more specific problems concerning the search for external confirmation of information provided by porphyry in our archaeological and epigraphical material.
