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Cursed By A Bite Analysis

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Vampires and Zombies Reborn
“Cursed By a Bite”, by Matt Kaplan from the book Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters (2012), explores the history of vampires and zombies and how they relate to actual events. This paper will show the effectiveness of the author’s use ethos, pathos, and logos and how the text fulfills its purpose for a historical and scientific audience. Throughout this paper the reader is shown how effective Matt Kaplan’s text Cursed By a Bite is.
Matt Kaplan’s text is for an audience that is interested in a scientific explanation of the origins of mythical monsters with the use of historical context. Some of the historical context in the text Cursed By a Bite includes when Kaplan references the plague that spread through Europe, the history of garlic in many cultures, and historical accounts of cases of rabies. The audience is …show more content…

For instance, Matt Kaplan studied the sciences at MIT and folklore at Harvard. He has also written articles for the National Geographic, Nature, New Scientist and the Economist. Kaplan has also published a book called Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters (2012) where he investigated the origins of many mythical creatures using history and biochemistry. Furthermore, he uses credible and scholarly sources for many examples in his text of Cursed By a Bite. For example, he uses sources from Zora Neale Hurston, a student of the noted anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University to explain in detail about the zombies in Haiti. Not to mention, Kaplan also uses Harvard ethno biologist Edmund Wade Davis to explore more into the scientific study of how poisons were being used in Haiti to make living zombies. These are just a few of the ways Kaplan uses ethos to support his theory of the origins of vampires and

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