Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A study of popular literature and its cultural contexts. May be defined by genre, author, period, or critical approach. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught, though students who obtained credit for ENGL 363 prior to Summer 2015 may not take this course for further credit. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Buffy Studies: A Case Study in Reading Popular Culture

The first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired twenty years ago, and the academic subfield of “Buffy Studies” probably peaked around 2005. (By 2009, Slayage: The Online Journal of Buffy Studies had become Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association, and by 2012 it had switched from publishing quarterly to publishing just twice a year.)  So this is not a hip, edgy, or terribly current cultural studies course.  On the other hand, the current President of the United States showcases many of the traits allegorized and supernaturalized in the Big Bads of (at least) Buffy’s Seasons One, Two, Three, Six, and Seven, so we cannot simply write the show off as an outdated marker of 1990s/Third Wave/“grrl power” white feminism.  Furthermore, Buffy’s influence on a range of currently hip shows—from Orphan Black to Stranger Things—is unmistakable.

So this is partly a class about Buffy—a show that, like television itself, was sometimes formulaic, sometimes jaw-droppingly brilliant—and partly a class about what we do when we write and think about popular culture.  So as we do close readings of the show’s 144 episodes and 7 seasons, and as we put it in the myriad 90s contexts of network television, indie rock, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the rise of computer nerd culture (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), “Generation X,” the Columbine massacre, and 90s white feminism, among others, we’ll also investigate why and how people—including us—write (and wrote) about that show.  As Amelie Hastie asks in one essay on Buffy, “How do we avoid falling into television’s own traps of ephemerality, obsolescence, and market demands?”  How do we write a cultural criticism that isn’t just dolled-up fanboydom/fangirldom?  What, as too many academics have already punned, are the “stakes” of writing about Buffy?  Put differently, if Buffy is so great, why hasn’t it produced any major criticism?  Conversely, if it’s so last century, why have its thematic concerns come roaring back so powerfully in this one?  Like the undead?

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Students will read and write better.
Students will become acquainted with the major strands of cultural studies from the Birmingham School to the present.
Students will be able to apply those strands to Buffy as appropriate.
Students will begin to be able to distinguish between major and minor cultural criticism, insightful and pedestrian scholarly articles.
Students will interrogate their own critical practices and affects.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: