Professor David Peimer
Understanding Transylvania: Myths and Legends- Dracula and Others
Summary
Professor David Peimer discusses the role of myths and legends, specifically exploring Transylvania and the great Dracula myth.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Well, I think that’s what I was trying to allude to. Yes. And it starts with Frankenstein, with Mary Shelley and others that it’s all part of… if you like the shadow darker side of I think scientific endeavors and the scientific rational of the 19th century. I think Dracula is part of that whole meilleu, of that whole era of the triumph of science, the attempted triumph of science and rationalism of the enlightenment, which then of course the flip side smashes completely.
When the story becomes two-dimensional, goodies and baddies, simple right and wrong, and there’s no, and that’s it. It becomes dangerous and it becomes afterwards kitsch.