buffy the... slayer of varney the vampire?

[intrikate88]

One of my favorite teachers ever, Lillie Craton, is pondering working Buffy into her fall Romanticism course. Of course, it is essential this must happen; also, due to the various English majors lying strewn about this place, we all should be able to come up with some good argument tying the two together.

I'm thinking something along the gothic lines, possibly concepts of Otherness, even though I know that's sort of a lot of postcolonial talk. Are there any illustrations of the sublime in Buffy? Definitely some very extreme settings and values, and seriously, let's discuss the concept of the grotesque in the show. I think some of that would fit in Buffy's choices in lovers- vampires with bloody pasts would count as the Othered Grotesque or something, right?

Not to mention Angel's guilt complexes about everything he's done is pretty Byronic, a bit of the Manfred going on there.

Thoughts?

Comments

[ninamazing.livejournal.com]

Definitely Byronic with Angel. You should definitely explore that.

I am still absorbing the idea that I can talk about things I like in classes, as I wasn't allowed to go to school for English or creative writing or film or radio or TV or anything I actually wanted to do. :P It's kind of freaking me out, actually. Will I stop liking these things once I'm in classes for them? Also, what is "Othered Grotesque"? That sounds fucking AWESOME.

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm thinking Angel and BtVS a2 is probably just one big gothic Byronesque wet dream or something.

If you've got enough passion for the things you like, I think it will stick around. I was pretty afraid I'd stop liking to read while getting an English degree, but really, I like it even more; the only difference is that I know how to elucidate more effectively. I've started to see what lies beneath the surface in stories, and I think it's fascinating, even though plenty of people say that finding things like that out ruins it for them. I just love the depth and the possibilities; I think it's like archaeology would be, what with digging up treasures, if you didn't have to scrape tons of sand around with a toothbrush. So, while you may be different than me and I'm so guilty of solipsism and just assuming everybody thinks the way I do, I think that instead of finding less interesting tidbits while studying, you'll be finding more. :)

As for the Othered Grotesque, I might have just made that up out of a few concepts, or maybe not. You're probably familiar iwth the concept of the Other- something that is made the weird alternative or opposite of normal in a situation or text. I once wrote a paper about the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil arguing that it sets the protagonist up as normal, being a New Yorker and straight, thus making the other characters, who are Southern and have different sexualities, the Other in that situation; this allows them to be stereotyped and generalized rather than fleshed out and explored as real human beings. That's what Othering something generally does- it dismisses it as being as real as the normal, and turns it into a type to be discriminated against.
The grotesque is a term out of Gothic and Romantic literature- it too is a concept of Otherness, an adjective describing something monstrous and animalistic, often grounded in extreme physicality and concerns over sexuality. It often evokes humor, strangely enough, by turning something that is familiar into something that causes alienation. I'm not really familiar with traditional Gothic canon such as The Monk or The Castle of Otrantro, but I have worked with texts in the Southern Gothic tradition, such as stories by Flannery O'Connor or Carson McCullers. (You might read O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html) for an example of this genre, and the portrayal of the grotesque outsider.)