You know, I can't help but wonder if there were other "stuffies" saying the same when Socrates or Aristotles were performing their works? Oh, how history repeats itself.

Madhatter | August 09, 22:03 CET

That was awesome.
And yes, MadHatter, it's an old story. Those in positions of power in academia always criticize the new and contemporary forms emerging in the arts. It threatens what they've been taught (and therefore what they teach) as canon. Novels were once considered sensational crack by those who held the canon close. Plays catered to the lowest common denominator if you asked the moral majority. Today, film and TV get the brunt of conservative cultural snobbery. Their loss. But entirely predictable.

orphea | August 09, 22:09 CET

Great article...the author really understands why Buffy matters, not just that it's fun and cool and funny. Great stuff.

Chris inVirginia | August 09, 23:14 CET

Here Here to the author!

Spangel | August 09, 23:18 CET

Made me tingly as well. :)

April | August 10, 01:07 CET

Heard it all before... Theater? First refuge of the disreputable. Novels? Inane pulp fodder for the bored lower classes. Cinema has barely moved into respectability; we might need another fifty to a hundred years before the TV classics are safe for academia.

cjl | August 10, 01:36 CET

Amen to all that. I completely agree with the author, here here for putting those old stuffy "scholars" in their place.

Pmacca01 | August 10, 02:28 CET

Pretty much every artistic medium caters to the lowest common denominator, these days. Except maybe plays, I guess because they're now considered an "artsy" artform.

Ilana | August 10, 02:44 CET

Great article. Anybody have a link to an English-language version?
;-)

tehipite_tom | August 10, 03:19 CET

Most people today fail to realise that Shakespear wrote for the common masses, not the intelectual elite. If he were alive today he'd be a showrunner on a TV show.

When Buffy was still on air I was a mod on a posting board that discussed every episode in great detail. We had posters from thirteen to sixty and would spend days or weeks discussing the moral dilema of the characters, their motovations, their strengths and weaknesses. Because we had such great characters and shades of grey, where good people did bad things for good reasons or where our hereos did bad things for love or hate and where everyone isn't forgiven at the end of every episode.

We had one young poster who said here English teacher had set them a new task in class, read a book and discuss the motivations and actions of the main characters. Most of the class had no idea of subtext or inner goals but our poster said she realised this was exactly the sort of thing she did every week with Buffy. She read the book and got top marks for her essay.

zz9 | August 10, 03:28 CET

Capn Dummytalk translation...
Buffy - Good. Cultural Stuffy's - Boring.
I really enjoyed this article, and I really hope they bring Buffy into the school english curriculum. My kids would get an A+ on the assignments.

Edit: I wouldn't get me no A, my spelling is atrocious!

[ edited by nixygirl on 2005-08-10 01:33 ]

nixygirl | August 10, 03:31 CET

I'm glad that Buffy seems to be well respected among scholars. I've heard of universities doing weekends where people come to discuss and debate Joss's shows. I've heard of people doing their dissertations on themes from them. And of course we all know there are loads of books analysing the philosophy, language, pop culture or spiritual aspects of the shows.

Basically, they're all very rich and intelligent, perfect to be analysed and discussed as art. I also think that there are a lot of other programs out there that also deserve such recognition and to be analysed.

I think it's fair that if books, theatre and films are examined and studied in universities or schools, then TV should be too. I know people will complain and think that it sohuld only be books and very old material, but many modern films or TV shows can also be fruitfully looked at because all great art involves the big human issues- love, death, revenge, heroism and such.

I agree that there is a limit to the amount of modern material that should be looked at. Even though there are a substantial number of fantastic, intelligent, enjoyable programs out there, there are also a lot of very bad ones and I don't think that most of these need to be considered. But the same goes for film or books, there are also many bad examples of those.

But I do think Joss's shows deserve their place to be studied, and hopefully this will continue for a long time, eventually proving to everyone that it wasn't a case of just trying to study something modern even if it doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.

Razor | August 10, 03:48 CET

Bah this is so typical of the Australian government.

Stepping away from politics, it is really great that people are recognising the value of Buffy. I personally don't see the difference in using a show and using a book to teach things, and being a very visual learner, I think there's a far better chance that I'd sit through Buffy than a reading of Sartre. It's just a difference in media, I can't see why so many politicians/educators have a problem with it. It's also shocking how most of these people have never watched Buffy, or have only watched it from the POV of entertainment..

non sequitur | August 10, 04:11 CET

Well, SOMEbody in academia is teaching Buffy, or the "stuffies" wouldn't be upset. And Film and TV courses are mainstream in curricula in a large number of colleges and universities. So let's not miss the author's point here, and paint academia with too broad a "stuffy scholar" brush. The canon debates still rage on in many places. True. And the pendulum swings widely as to the balance of dead white men and diverse contemporary writers in departments across the country. But the issue here is the politics. Why should we expect the politicians to do anything but polarize the issues and exaggerate/over-simplify to make a point, to get support for whatever rules or regulations they want to impose on the universities, to take away the professors' rights to teach what is necessary for their students to learn to compete in today's world. The issue is to teach students critical thinking and analytical skills, regardless of the texts (my personal belief is that a balance of old and new is necessary). But that doesn't fit into a politician's sound bite or on a bumper sticker.

palehorse | August 10, 04:13 CET

For the record, I once wrote a paper analyzing Aristotelian ethics through the lens of Buffy and James O'Barr's The Crow. Guess all that book learnin' were fer nuthin'. ;-)

So many people seem to forget that Shakespeare and Dickens and even the Greek playwrights were pop culture at one time.

RambleOn623 | August 10, 05:07 CET

I bought a newish edition of The Crow last month RambleOn623. Guess that makes me smart too! :)

April | August 10, 05:09 CET

"Why should we expect the politicians to do anything but polarize the issues and exaggerate/over-simplify to make a point, to get support for whatever rules or regulations they want to impose on the universities, to take away the professors' rights to teach what is necessary for their students to learn to compete in today's world."

Nice post palehorse. The fact is, we shouldn't. The men (yep, just men) who run this country are still subscribing to and clinging to an archaic mindset that precludes intellectual and social progress and dismisses women, the poor and minorities as parasites. Since Buffy falls into one of those categories, it shouldn't surprise any of us that this kind of thing happens unchecked.

Still, occasionally the sun breaks through the clouds. I have high hopes for Barack Obama. Dare I say that his fair-mindedness has put him on my short list for future presidential possibilities (perhaps within the next twelve years)? He's WAY green (inexperienced, not Nader green - NTTAWWT!) and he has a few beliefs that I am at odds with (religion), but until we can infuse the oval office with more estrogen, he's a good start.

Willowy | August 10, 05:11 CET

NTTAWWT

I'm intrigued. Translation?

April | August 10, 05:22 CET

Sorry! An old Seinfeld expression that is used a lot: "Not that there's anything WRONG with that!"

;)

Willowy | August 10, 05:25 CET

I'm imagining the current oval office resident on estrogen therapy.

And, Palehorse, I appreciate the distinction between politicians and academics. As academics, we spend a lot of time justifying our work to politicians who spent their time in school hating their teachers and trying to think of ways to avoid intellectual effort.

Biff Turkle | August 10, 06:55 CET

I've been lucky enough to study Buffy every year for the past few... doing 'The I in Team' and 'Goodbye, Iowa' this year as part of a literature course focusing on texts of creation/forbidden knownledge - we go from Genesis to Buffy - it's great for the show to be included with all the stuff in between

aapac | August 10, 09:54 CET

I'm a teacher of English in England. Fellow-Brits will recognise the term GCSE, and I have done a coursework module with my Year 10 class (age 14-15) on "Crush" and "The Body" - use of genre to explore serious issues - which went down very well. And my colleague who is teaching a module on "The Gothic" for Upper Sixth A Level English Literature (think AP or beyond) has asked me to come in and do a session with her class on Joss's use of Gothic "vocabulary" in "Buffy" and "Angel".

Just doing my little bit to spread the word.

My older daughter's boyfriend attends the school where I teach. He took her to a party for his year-group last month, where the main thing his friends said to her about me (or at least, all she was prepared to repeat!) was "Your mum's the expert on "Buffy" who knows the name of every episode, isn't she?"

Expert indeed. In present company I am a rank amateur!

Gill | August 10, 13:17 CET

I look forward to using Whedon in my future English classrooms, but some observant posters probably remember me repeating that before. :) Possible plans with Firefly this fall. *fingers crossed* "You can't pop in the DVD just 'cause it's fun" is my current refrain. It sure is tempting though, isn't it?

April | August 10, 15:23 CET

April, more than tempting. But at least as English teachers we can easily find a direct relevance to the subject. Pity the poor geography teacher.

Gill | August 10, 19:55 CET

Geography? Well, in Buffy there are references to California, England, China, Romania, the Carribean and Iowa (somewhere in the middle) that I recall...

newcj | August 10, 20:03 CET

Don't forget Cleveland...;)

Willowy | August 10, 20:06 CET

And all those clips in Season 7 of potentials getting killed around the world: Instanbul, Germany... Hell, it's a cornicopia of geographic knowledge :-)

As for other unintential facts I've picked up from Buffy: I was embarrassed, when visiting LA recently and reading in a guidebook about the history of the Chumash tribe, to realize that the only other place I'd heard about the Chumash was on Buffy....

acp | August 10, 20:17 CET

While looking for a nice buttery Chardonnay to take to a friend's house, I ran across a bottle of Anapuma...apparently Chumash country is great for growing the grapes!

Heh. Bought it on the spot solely due to that connection, and it was delish! Definitely recommended.

Willowy | August 10, 20:28 CET

I'm going to out myself as a Cultural Stuffy. I love Buffy, but honestly I think it would be a shame to substitute Buffy for Milton, Sophocles and Joyce. I thought I was as big a defender of Joss Whedon as there was, but I don't rank his TV dialogue at quite the level of the aforementioned. I don't think the division of culture into high and low is arbitrary at all (post-modernist conclusions notwithstanding). Yes, if you're going to direct academic scrutiny at contemporary pop culture, Buffy is as good a subject as any, but I don't think that doing so should be a high priority for universities.

Getting at philosophical and aesthetic questions through pop culture can be fun, and make these things more accessible for kids. But I don't think that in and of themselves Buffy, Angel and Firefly are as worthy of academic scrutiny as King Lear and The Canterbury Tales.

And I'm sure Joss would be the first to agree.

fruit punch mouth | August 10, 22:16 CET

Now that fruit punch mouth has made it safe, ;), I'm going to agree with him in part. I think if it's a case of substituting BtVS for Paradise Lost, that would be wrong. Complementing, or contrasting, maybe not so much.

I also agree that the high/low culture division is not arbitrary - presumably the "original" division was along the lines of sacred v. profane, i.e., relating to the spiritual rather than the mundane. I see that division now as between art that is made to "last" versus art that would normally be considered as disposable. TV may be justifiably looked down upon because TV, to a great extent, is a self-consciously disposable product. Wipe on, wipe off.

I think Joss (and David Milch, and others) have changed that paradigm - but we need time to assess just what art will endure and what won't. The measure of a work's influence and importance necessarily only becomes clear over time - that, IMHO, is why cinema is only now accepted as (sometimes) high art, and why TV, as a younger form, is still struggling for that acceptance. Seems to me the "great" writers/artists are defined as such mostly by the longevity of their works, not by the amount of contemporaneous critical praise they receive. I have no doubt Joss's work will be considered "classic" in fifty years or so, but I don't think it's so wrong to adopt a rather more sniffy attitude towards it for now.

SoddingNancyTribe | August 10, 22:52 CET

Heck, SNT, I'd be the last person to teach Joss instead of Shakespeare and co. That same group had already studied Steinbeck, "Romeo and Juliet", "A Man For All Seasons" and poetry by Donne, Milton and Wordsworth inter alia that year. But if they are required to do a coursework piece analysing something from the filmed media, I know what I will go for, every time!

Gill | August 10, 23:09 CET

"I have no doubt Joss's work will be considered 'classic' in fifty years or so…"

If only we had full-access to 50-year-old stuff now. Can you imagine how different things would be now if we did? To be able to throw on a DVD and see how much things have changed in the last 50 years?

I realize that we have access to some things from that era, but nothing like the volume that will exist 50 years from now.

brownishcoat | August 10, 23:09 CET

"Seems to me the "great" writers/artists are defined as such mostly by the longevity of their works, not by the amount of contemporaneous critical praise they receive. I have no doubt Joss's work will be considered "classic" in fifty years or so"

Yes, SNT. I have this "theory" the Firefly/Serenity fanbase will grow and grow, especially over the next twenty years. Once you're hooked, you're always a fan. But this is the type of show that will continue to garner support for years because the quality transcends time. At least in the span of a couple/few decades, I'm guessing. I imagine a show like X-Files has thoroughly saturated the adult viewing market but it would still pique the interest of some younger newer viewers, those that could see past *snort* what, outdated clothes, cellphones, and cars? It's so NOT tied to pop culture it's not aging the way other popular yet more trendy shows might. And what's trendier than "reality" tv?

April | August 11, 06:10 CET

I agree that Whedon should not replace Shakespeare, but it should not be a question of replacing. I think that something extremely contemporary and accessable is very useful in showing that literary analysis is not a boring exercise used only to understand old incomprehensable writings no one could possibly understand any other way. (Not my view of the classics, a mythical student's view.) Whedon's work has everything one could want to illustrate different kinds of analysis and uses of literary devices without having to also deal with major differences in culture, language, historical context etc.


Just sayin'

newcj | August 11, 09:20 CET

I agree with newcj that applying literary criticism to pop culture can make academics more accessible for some students. I made a similar point myself. A couple people have mentioned that they think the study of Buffy et al should complement, rather than replace, study of the classics. That's easy to say, but whatever time you spend on pop culture leaves less time for the classics.

People are likely to find their way to pop culture on their own, without the help of the university, but not too many of them are going to find Lord Jim or Immanuel Kant that way, so I really think pop culture studies should be very much marginalized in college.

fruit punch mouth | August 11, 10:50 CET