The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Anthony Curtis Adler
Feb 2014 · punctum books
5.0star
1 review
Ebook
76
Pages
About this ebook
Could there have been television without California? California without
television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel
singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of
the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and
again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience - a
pure surface that will never get caught in the ditch of time - they are
also both haunted through and through: by the itinerant contents of the
past that they cannot banish, by memories of the infantile-perverse
utopian fantasies that taunt us in constant replay ("If you're going to
San Francisco...," "two girls for every guy"), by the contradiction
played out in the very gesture of dismissing history and leaving the
dead to bury the dead. California and television, as it were, conspire
in a vampirologic: the forever-young is what has been there the longest,
what really "takes us back." And so we also will take ourselves back:
to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, already almost charmingly quaint, and
Walter Benjamin's magnum opus The Origin of the German Mourning-Play.
What can come of this improbable conjunction? It will not seem too
strange that Benjamin, posthumous wanderer across the textures of
Americana, should again take up lodging at the Hotel California. But
more is at stake than just another hapless visitation from the on high
of high theory: reading Buffy as the remediated afterlife of the
dead-on-arrival genre of the baroque German mourning play, Adler's book
records the first broken, awkward steps toward a project that, with the
recent rise of "quality television," seems more urgent than ever before:
a political-theological characteristic of the television series.
television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel
singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of
the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and
again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience - a
pure surface that will never get caught in the ditch of time - they are
also both haunted through and through: by the itinerant contents of the
past that they cannot banish, by memories of the infantile-perverse
utopian fantasies that taunt us in constant replay ("If you're going to
San Francisco...," "two girls for every guy"), by the contradiction
played out in the very gesture of dismissing history and leaving the
dead to bury the dead. California and television, as it were, conspire
in a vampirologic: the forever-young is what has been there the longest,
what really "takes us back." And so we also will take ourselves back:
to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, already almost charmingly quaint, and
Walter Benjamin's magnum opus The Origin of the German Mourning-Play.
What can come of this improbable conjunction? It will not seem too
strange that Benjamin, posthumous wanderer across the textures of
Americana, should again take up lodging at the Hotel California. But
more is at stake than just another hapless visitation from the on high
of high theory: reading Buffy as the remediated afterlife of the
dead-on-arrival genre of the baroque German mourning play, Adler's book
records the first broken, awkward steps toward a project that, with the
recent rise of "quality television," seems more urgent than ever before:
a political-theological characteristic of the television series.
Ratings and reviews
5.0
1 review
About the author
Anthony Curtis Adler is Associate Professor of German and Comparative
Literature at Yonsei University's Underwood International College in
South Korea, where he has been teaching since 2006. He has published
essays on Fichte, Hölderlin, Goethe, Kant, H.C. Andersen, and Agamben,
and is currently finishing two book projects: "Labyrinthine Dances:
Choreography, Economy, and the Politics of Gesture in Hölderlin's
Hyperion," and "Celebricities: Celebrity, The Phenomenology of
Television, and Gadget-Life."
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.