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’The Seducer’s [Missing] Diary": Damon and the Aesthetics of Seduction in The Vampire Diaries
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Education, Language, and Teaching.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9649-0873
2013 (English)In: “The Vampire in Literature, Culture and Film: I: The Vampire Diaries,”, 2013Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Everyone does it in the television series The Vampire Diaries, everyone except Damon, that is. They all write diaries. In “The Seducer’s Diary,” the best-known extract from his major philosophical works, Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard presents a fictional example of the life of “the seducer,” which he positions in direct opposition to the ethical life. Kierkegaard’s seducer gains pleasure from the possibilities that a seduction offers, rather than from the act of seduction itself. In Kirekegaard’s text, aesthetic pleasure is derived primarily from the narration; the seducer creates scenarios solely to improve his diary’s aesthetics. In the first two seasons of The Vampire Diaries, Damon acts as the series’ primary vampiric seducer. Like Kierkegaard’s seducer, Damon appears to experience pleasure primarily on an aesthetic level. Yet unlike the former, he does not engage in diary writing. Diary writing suggests a self-reflexive mode, a tendency towards introspection, in which Damon, unlike his brother Stefan, is not interested. The diary form is also considered the least reliable type of life writing. In this paper, I argue that Damon achieves aesthetic pleasure through other means, more in tune with the medium in which his story is told. These means include the staging of “seduction” scenes that borrow their visual aesthetics from classic horror films, such as the use of fog and shadows. The paper goes on to argue that these acts imply a more artistic and sensitive side of Damon, in contrast to Stefan, whose emotional diary entries for a long time end up obscuring his less acceptable personality traits from viewers. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2013.
Keywords [en]
television, aesthetics, The Vampire Diaries
National Category
Humanities and the Arts Didactics
Research subject
English, Specialization in Didactics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-66778OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-66778DiVA, id: diva2:1160684
Conference
Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association National Conference, Washington, D.C., 27-30 March 2013
Available from: 2017-11-28 Created: 2017-11-28 Last updated: 2020-06-11Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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