Chase Berggrun’s poetry book, R E D, is an erasure of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. According to Berggrun’s website, “R E D excavates from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through the process of erasure, an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage, and wrestles with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.”

I am interested in looking at the way Berggrun deconstructs Stoker’s text not only to create erasure poems, but to completely flip the narrative on its head to explore ideas of gender using queer theory. By applying deconstruction to the Dracula through R E D, and applying queer theory to R E D directly, I will explore how queer voices have been historically erased, and Berggrun uses literal erasure to begin to give them back some of their power.

X: Exploration of gender in R E D by Chase Berggrun.

Y: How have queer voices been historically erased? In what ways are they fighting back against that?

Z: By pushing back on these traditional and exclusionary structures, queer voices are able to reclaim their stories in the very ones that cut them out in the first place.

As a preliminary secondary source, I may look at “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity” by Thomas Stuart. “Out of Time” explores Dracula and how the titular character “stand[s] in opposition to the progress- and procreation-oriented culture of fin-de-siècle England. This paper examines the Gothic queerness of stopped time, arguing that a subtle figuration of these characters as trans- underlies their radical break from a contemporary eugenic logic. A trans- impulse in these texts—one that encompasses taxonomic, temporal, and gender boundaries—initially marks the monstrous body but ultimately engulfs the English subject,” according to the article’s abstract.

Works Cited:

Berggrun, Chase. “Home: Chase Berggrun.” Website, 2017, http://www.chaseberggrun.com/.

 

Potential sources (primary and secondary):

Berggrun, Chase. R E D. Birds, LLC, 2018.

Stuart, Thomas M. “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 2, Winter 2018, pp. 218–227. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.60.2.07.

Tarner, Margaret, and Bram Stoker. Dracula. Macmillan Heinemann, 2005.