Course Description and Objectives:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an extremely “full” text, playing on ideological fault lines (the “Hellmouth,” if you will) throughout its 103 hours. The series, self-consciously generic in conception and execution, allows this course to examine the histories, theories, and traditions of the musical, melodrama, comedy, silent film and horror genres. Through the “buffyverse” (a media space that includes spin-offs, comics, games, and books, but also such unofficial forms as fan fiction), students will have the opportunity to examine how the media product in a digital/industrial society, like the mythic folktale in other cultures, serves as a site where society collectively speaks to itself, confronting basic human issues in a familiar context. By investigating issues that our culture has returned to time and again, often presenting conflicting answers to the same troubling questions, students will be able to examine the socially constructed nature of our relationship to our culture and the social world, our own bodies and ways of thinking.
Statement of Learning Objectives:
• Students should exit the course with a paper worthy of publication in an academic journal devoted to student writing or for the writing sample required for entry to graduate school.
• Give TV/Video majors the rare opportunity study the evolution of a single, long-running series in its entirety. This course will offer students the depth of understanding granted by courses that study the work of a single director.
• Students will practice a variety of critical approaches on a single subject: genre and auteur theory, cultural studies, and close reading of individual episodes.
• Students will investigate how actual audiences actually used and still use the series through fan fiction, series bulletin boards, and audience research.
• Students will explore how the modern media environment alters the traditional understanding of the meaning of series through a thorough investigation of spin-offs, comic books, soundtracks, videogames, and even board games.
In declining order of time spent, I cover the application and subversion of various genres, the series' politics, narrative complexity (foreshadowing, evolution, involution, and echoes), formal approaches, and lastly auteurism. So, while its focus is the media studies angle, definitely women's studies and religious studies get brought in.
It's a basic trope of media studies to fully analyze a film like Psycho over a few classes. But with a television series, it requires much more time to accomplish that task, even when it's with relatively short series like the Prisoner or Twin Peaks, let alone something as expansive as the Buffyverse. I don't feel like I cover the entire series; I definitely depend on student papers and online discussion to help broaden things out beyond seasons 1-4 and 6. Every year, I drop a topic and start something new. This year I dropped analyzing Jane Espenson as an auteur working within another creator's work in favor of a look through the Buffyverse's vidding culture.
While there's 12+ academic books and 200+ scholarly articles on the series, if I had to offer just one example of what someone can do with the series, I'd suggest reading Rhonda Wilcox's Why Buffy Matters. She's got a nice balance between sensitive evocation of the episodes and digging for themes. (If you want an example of my writing, check out:
Slayage 22: Kociemba) Other notable books include Fighting the Forces, Buffy Goes Dark, and Reading the Vampire Slayer.
Basically, it's incredibly fun to talk with students about it and awfully demanding to teach. Feel free to ask me other questions about it. I'm happy as a clam to procrastinate from grading!
