Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Scholarly Buffy-philes gather at an English university to discuss the "morphic resonance" and "perlocutionary acts" of TV's favorite ghoul-killin' gal.
Nov 9, 2002 | I hadn't flown 3,000 miles to see Spike naked. But let's just say it didn't hurt.
It wasn't the actual Spike, of course -- but we'll get to that later. What I'd flown 3,000 miles for was the first-ever academic conference organized around a show with a ridiculous name that a respectable number of sensible grown-ups -- myself included -- take pretty seriously. Blood, Text and Fears: Reading Around "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, on Oct. 19 and 20, brought together some 160 of the faithful, who came not only from the United Kingdom but also from the United States, Italy, Canada and Australia.
After submitting an abstract, I'd been invited to present a paper on "Buffy," but I was even more interested to hear what other people -- most of them, unlike me, somehow affiliated with the academic community -- had to say about the show.
No, wait -- I'll come clean. Sifting through the titles of the papers to be presented ("From 'Metropolis' to 'Melrose Place': Morphic Resonance in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'"; "Extending Your Mind: The Role of Non-Standard Perlocutionary Acts in 'Buffy'"; and even the forthright and alluring "Drusilla: Disruptive Monster, Dark Goddess, Daddy's Girl"), I wondered if I had the chops for this enterprise: Would the kind folks at UEA Norwich have let me in if I'd admitted that I hadn't the faintest idea what a perlocutionary act might be? Because I wasn't sure I could actually handle two full days of academics' "reading around" a show I adore -- or reading around anything, actually -- I'd taken the precaution of signing up for only one day of the conference.
Damned if by the end of the first day I wasn't wishing I'd signed up for the second.
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Norwich is a smallish city 115 miles northeast of London, a train ride just shy of two hours. It's a reasonably handsome place, with an imposing cathedral and a bustling city center with plenty of chain stores as well as a marvelous-looking turn-of-the-century beaux-arts shopping arcade, the likes of which you'd never see in the United States. Norwich also has a number of quaintly appointed B&Bs. The one my husband and I chose before we left New York actually had heat, which, as the giant spiral-bound rule book placed in our room told us, was officially turned on between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., and again between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m.
The tradition of Americans' making jokes about being cold in England is a long and tired one, and I won't go down that path here, although I'm not sure that even the ugliest American deserves to wake up to a toilet seat that has been artfully chilled by one's hosts to the temperature of 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
After being beaten into submission by B&B regulations ("Do not smoke, even out the window. WE WILL KNOW. Guests who smoke in the room will be promptly ejected and charged for any damages") I became more and more certain that spending a day with academics would be nothing short of lovely. My first view of the UEA campus seemed to bear that out: It's a pretty and efficient-looking sprawl, home to a very well regarded curriculum in film and television studies.
The conference schedule was packed tight, starting with a welcome from the dean of the School of English & American Studies -- who admitted that he didn't watch the show but who seemed to be fairly good-natured about playing host to so many earnest fans -- and a smart and straightforward opening paper, on the subject of light imagery in "Buffy," by Rhonda Wilcox, a professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, Ga.
In the relatively small intersection of the Venn diagram showing all "Buffy" fans who are also serious academics, Wilcox and her colleague, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, are something like rock stars. She and Lavery (who also presented a paper at the conference, "A Religion in Narrative: Joss Whedon and Television Creativity") run Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, devoted to collecting thoughtful discourse about the show. The two have also co-edited a book of essays called "Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'" which was for sale at a bookstore table at the conference; some "Buffy" fans who bought them even asked Wilcox and Lavery to sign their copies.
Maybe it sounds patronizing to refer to the conference attendees as "fans." But the truth is that nearly every person who presented a paper (and not just the people who had come to listen) behaved like lovers of the show first and foremost -- and academics, scholars and writers, second. It wasn't that people didn't take their papers seriously; in fact, most managed to pack an extraordinary amount of care and research into papers that had to adhere to a strict 20-minute limit.
This was an extraordinarily good-natured group: There was no academic puffery, no surly competitiveness. (As it turned out, not all of them were "professional" academics; quite a few of those presenting papers, for example, were independent scholars.) I never quite forgot I was in the presence of academics -- I kept a running list of words and names (diegesis? Homi Bhabha?) to look up later, although of course I never did. But nearly all the papers were refreshingly non-theoretical.
And the most amazing thing was that virtually no one -- at least among the presenters I heard -- approached "Buffy" from a stance of detached coolness. How many times have you seen professional critics (members of that group who, you could argue, are supposedly paid to be publicly passionate about the things they care about) on TV or on a panel, qualifying their opinions about a movie or TV show they clearly like, as if they were embarrassed to admit to liking anything too much? The people who showed up in Norwich had no compunction about admitting how much they loved "Buffy," and everything they said -- in their papers, in the question-and-answer sessions, and in casual conversation -- proved how much the show energized or inspired them.
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