Music II

Chair: Hannah Sanders

Fandoms II: Fan Communities

Chair: Carol O'Sullivan

C. Wiley: "I Believe the Subtext Here is Rapidly Becoming Text": Music, Gender and Fantasy in BtVS

M. Mills: Meaning and Myth: Leitmotivic Procedures in the Musical Underscore to Angel, Season One

G. Bloustien: Buffy Night at the Seven Stars

J. Fitzpatrick / J. Fischer / A. McCourt: Parasocialism and BtVS

Unaired Pilot or Bad Quarto: Textual Problems in Buffy and Shakespeare in an Internet Age

John W. Briggs, Independent Scholar, UK.

The first published version of Hamlet, the so-called Bad Quarto, is about half the length of the familiar version, with scenes missing or in a different order, and with famous speeches having different words. This is strikingly similar to the case of the 'unaired pilot' of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which only lasts 25 minutes, has a different actress playing Willow, and a Buffy with brown hair. There are parallels too in its position outside the canon and its unofficial or pirate status of publication. This paper examines the genesis of the opening episodes of Series One of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from writer's first draft to completed episode, concentating on the pivotal role of the unaired pilot, and drawing on textual studies of film, plays and, of course, Shakespearean texts. A chronological reconstruction of events surrounding the shooting of the 'unaired pilot' is attempted. Some interesting and anomalous features of the 'unaired pilot' are discussed. The various types of Shakespearean text, Bad Quarto, Good Quarto and Folio are introduced, together with the various theories over their origins, and the problems they present are outlined, as are the parallels with the various Buffy texts. I seek to show that the field of textual scholarship, and Shakespearean textual studies in particular, has sufficient in common with Buffy studies for them to be mutually beneficial. A close study of the characteristics of both the Bad Quarto and the 'unaired pilot', using some of the same analytical techniques, can help illuminate the processes that led to their creation.

RESURRECTING THE AUTHOR: JOSS WHEDON'S PLACE IN BUFFY'S TEXTUAL UNIVERSE

Jonathan Gray -- Goldsmiths College

The author, Roland Barthes tells us, is dead. But if Buffy the Vampire Slayer has taught us anything, it is that what is dead can return, can be brought back ... albeit in new form. In this paper, then, I will argue that authors once more live amongst us, and I will focus on Joss Whedon as archetype of a growing new breed of author. Far from having been replaced by the Producer (as political economy approaches to popular culture would dictate), or wholly overtaken and possessed by the text (a la more textual approaches), Whedon is *and is seen as* an active force in both the production and reception of Buffy and Angel. As such, this paper argues that to understand texts such as Buffy and to fully appreciate their situatedness and significance in popular culture, we would be wise to once again talk of the author. Whereas Barthes's act of killing the author represented a strategic attempt to empower the reader, and to encourage more critical reflection upon the reader, we are now in a position where we should and must resurrect the author. Consequently, this study of Joss Whedon's place in the Buffyverse, its audiences interactions with it, and their discussion and construction of Whedon will take some preliminary steps towards re-theorising contemporary (inter)relations between author, reader, producer, text, television, and intertext. Although theoretical by nature, this paper will draw on Internet fan discussion of Whedon and Buffy, on interviews with Whedon, and will draw parallels with other, 'undead' authors such as Matt Groening and Chris Carter. The paper, therefore, aims to offer not only new ways to consider authorship, but also new ways to consider Buffy.

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Jonathan Gray

Goldsmiths College,

University of London

Proposal for Blood, Texts, and Fears: Reading Around Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon: Television Auteur

David Lavery, Middle Tennessee State University

"[B]ecause of the technological complexity of the medium and as a result of the application to most commercial television production of the principles of modern industrial organization . . . ," Robert C. Allen writes, "it is very difficult to locate the ‘author’ of a television program—if by that we mean the single individual who provides the unifying vision behind the program."

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, would seem to present no such problem. In addition to being, for the first five seasons, BtVS’ obsessive, hands-on creator and executive producer, Joss Whedon has written/co-written 21 episodes and directed 19 of them. Though (by his own admission) he knew very little about directing and virtually nothing about creating a television show prior to helming BtVS, Whedon has turned out some of the series’—and contemporary television’s—most memorable, and most innovative, episodes, including "Innocence," "Becoming" (I and II), "Hush," "Restless," "The Body," and "Once More, with Feeling."

Through careful examination of writing, themes, narrative style, and "televisuality," my talk at Blood, Texts, and Fears will offer a new-auteurist reading of Joss Whedon’s work on Buffy.

Bibliography

Allen, Robert C. "Introduction to the Second Edition: More Talk about TV." Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Ed. Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. 1-30.

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Lavery, David "The Genius of Joss Whedon." Afterword to Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002: 251-56.

Longworth, James. "Joss Whedon: Feminist." TV Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama. Vol. 2. The Television Series. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2002: 197-220.

Whedon, Joss. Commentary. "Welcome to the Hellmouth" and "The Harvest. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season. DVD 2002.

___. Interview with BBC Online http://www.bbc.co.uk/buffy/reallife/jossinterview.shtml

___. Interview with David Bianculli. Fresh Air 9 May 2000. Available online at http://whyy.org/cgi-bin/FAshowretrieve.cgi?2876

___. Interview with ET Online http://www.theslayershow.com/chat8.html

___. Interview with Fanforum http://www.fanforum.com/buffy/news/786.shtml

___. Interview with Fraxis. http://websites.cable.ntl.com/~fraxis/the_ww/features/whedon.html

___. Interview with The Watcher’s Web. http://websites.cable.ntl.com/~fraxis/the_ww/features/epk/joss.html

___. Interview. Angel + The Puppet Show. Videocassette. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998.

___. Interview. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest." Videocassette

___. Interview. Welcome to the Hellmouth. Videocassette, 1998.

___. "joss says: (Thu May 27 08:26:10 1999)." Online posting. 27 May 1999. The Bronze VIP Posting Board Archives. 25 July 2000. <http://www-pub.cise.ufl.edu/cgiwrap/hsiao/buffy/get-archive?date=1990527>.

___. "Joss Whedon" (interview with Tasha Robinson). The Onion AV Club http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3731/avfeature_3731.html

‘We few, we happy few…we band of buggered’: The Importance of Being English in BtVS

Scott MacKenzie, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia

One of the most striking aspects of BtVS is not the fact that Sunnydale is virtually over-run by vampires; rather, what’s most bizarre is that this Californian town is over-run by English people. And ‘Englishness’ in the context of BtVS is not simply one ethnic identity amongst many; instead it functions as a dual signifier of both power and danger, at times simultaneously. The duality that lies at the heart of representations of ‘Englishness’ in BtVS can be seen as a shift away from the straightforward notion of ‘Englishness’ as ‘otherness’ so often invoked by Hollywood in the past. For instance, posh, ‘RP’ English accents have functioned in Hollywood cinema not only to connote a certain strata of English class that is foreign to the US, but also, quite perversely, have been used as the dialect of choice to connote Nazism. In contrast to the conflicted and contested notion of ‘otherness’ that ‘Englishness’ and English dialects typically embody in Hollywood film and television, this paper will examine the myriad of ways in which ‘Englishness’ can be seen as a dialogical phenomena in BtVS. What is also of interest here is that in many ways BtVS can be read it terms of anglophilia at a time where the very concept of ‘Englishness’ is under intense scrutiny within the UK. Of particular interest will be an examination of how ‘Englishness’ and national identity are (re-) constituted in the roles of the Watcher and the vampire. More particularly, I shall explore how in Season Six’s Tabula Rasa Giles and Spike have to negotiate their own innate assumptions about ‘Englishness’ in order to reconstitute their sense of selfhood during a state of amnesia.

Passing for American: British and Vampire Identities in Buffy

Ann Davies

University of Newcastle

The fear of the vampire as social infiltrator - whose resemblance to the human suggests Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry as almost but not quite the same – came to the fore with Stoker’s Dracula, whose central character passes for an Englishman (the subsequent influence of Bela Lugosi notwithstanding). In Buffy, while it has been justly remarked that there is a distinct lack of representation of ethnic identities, the issue of ‘passing’ and infiltration still occurs, not only in relation to the vampires, who can apparently assume a vamp face at will, but also British characters, who can look like Americans and who speak the same language, but who are nonetheless in some way different: the ‘almost but not quite’ element of mimicry that Bhabha has suggested. (British here means Southern English – British regional identities have been unsurprisingly erased for the benefit of American audiences).

This paper examines the negotiation of passing in Buffy, in a Buffyverse that has developed an increasingly heterogeneous society in more recent seasons, within which a sharp distinction between good and evil starts to dissolve, and where demons such as Clem and Halfrek – to say nothing of Anya – interact on an equal footing with the humans. Only ‘paranoid’ Americans such as the early Riley and his Initiative team prefer not to see others in shades of grey – and their lack of discrimination is ruthlessly coopted by sinister government programmes. British and vampire identities in this context come to simultaneously highlight and problematise the (usually invisible) American identity; but simultaneously through their mimicry they come to problematise that distinction. Whereas passing in Dracula threatens English identity (which must be defended by the Crew of Light, of markedly differing nationalities), by series 6 of Buffy the threat to American society appears to come from Americans themselves rather than from those who pass.

Annette Seidel-Arpacı

Imaginary Para-Sites of the Soul: Representations of ‘Race’ and ‘Culture’ in Angel

What does it mean when a vampire was ‘cursed’ with a soul (by ‘gypsies’)? What about those vampires who are ‘staked’, ‘dusted’? What is this soul of Angel, who are the ‘good ones’ or the ‘evil ones’ and why, what do we make of ‘the powers’ and ‘Wolfram and Hart’? What are the human desires and fears behind the vampire myth, and what is the place of Angel, the ‘vampire with a soul’, who is constantly slipping in and out of the images that came to represent human ‘others’ in these dead and demonic forms?

My paper explores the ambivalent and contradictory constructions of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ in Angel, and seeks to read those images in relation to questions of ‘difference’, ‘otherness’ and assimilation. I will discuss the role(s) of Angel as well as (and in contrast to) other vampires within the series in connection with the history of images of ‘the vampire’, which echo(ed) at different times the racist stereotypes and propaganda about ‘the Jews’ and ‘the foreigners’ within several societies. In Angel these (ambivalent) images are also interesting in relation to archives, ‘demons’ and the representation of histories of ‘the other’ in the series. I will be drawing for instance on Nina Auerbach’ s reading of vampires as mirroring ‘ourselves’ and the political discourses and circumstances at a particular historical moment, on Sander Gilman’s work on constructions of ‘the Jew’s body’ and other works from the field of ‘Jewish Cultural Studies’.

Brainwashing the Working Class: Vampire Comics and Criticism from Dr. Occult to Buffy

Dr Massimo Introvigne

CESNUR

Via Confienza 19

10121 Torino, Italy

Abstract: When popular culture studies, newly born as an independent academic field, devoted their attention to comics, they were initially influenced by the critical analysis of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham (1895-1981), a staunch critic of horror comics. Wertham's ideas about the detrimental effects of horror comics on education were translated by popular culture scholars into a theory making horror comics a capitalist tool for brainwashing the working class. This debate caused in the 1950s both legislative developments (in the U.K.) and self-regulation through the Comics Code (in the U.S.), and halted for a while the development of vampire comics. Vampires, in fact, had emerged as the second most featured characters in comics after superheroes. Keeping vampires buried is, however, always difficult, and they re-emerged in the 1980s with even greater success. In the meantime, Umberto Eco had criticized in its influential essays on comics the "apocalyptic" approach to horror comics as capitalist brainwashing. In the late 1990s Buffy comics emerged among the most successful vampire comics ever and introduced a new revolution in the field. The paper examines the development of vampire comics within the framework of scholarly and political controversies on the social role of comics in general and horror comics in particular, and the role of Buffy comics.

If an overhead projector is available, the paper will be illustrated by transparencies.

CV: Dr Massimo Introvigne, a member of the "Religions" group of AIS (the Italian Association of Sociology), is managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), and the author or editor of more than thirty books (including one on Dracula and vampires), and more than a hundred articles in referred journals and collective books in the field of sociology of religion and popular culture. See bibliography at http://www.cesnur.org/testi/introvigne_biblio.htm

Ron Roberts (University of Strathclyde)

From Metropolis to Melrose Place: Morphic Resonance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The fabula of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s earlier episodes was controlled by a suzjet that mimicked four-colour comic book reality. Therefore, the entire universe of possible discourses within the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (including gender, sexuality, identity, belonging, race) was carefully filtered through the use and abuse of these comic-book conventions.

This comic book aesthetic subsumes these wider discourses under its fantastic logic. In a theoretical narrative hierarchy, the manipulation of such tropes as "the monster of the week", "the arch villain", "the double issue (double episode)", "the mysterious stranger" rank above the more prosaic "soap operatic" concerns while still allowing them to function in the background of the texts. This mixture of fantasy action and generic teenage angst enabled Buffy the Vampire Slayer to transcend ordinary genre audience boundaries, growing into the multimedia enterprise consumed today.

As the narrative structure of Buffy changes over time, so does its reception amongst certain target audiences. As the comic book structure peaks, so does the show’s popularity, leading to increased celebrity for recurring players, a wider, more homogenised consumer base, and the imposition of pseudo-"auteur" status on the show’s creator (one might also add academic interest to this list). These factors contribute to a radical restructuring of Buffy’s narrative framework, resulting in a dominant soap opera aesthetic. This fails to match the previous format’s potential for subversion and difference, turning the once radical show into a carefully stage-managed marketing exercise.

This paper will address both the radical nature of Buffy’s early narrative structure, and the shift in narrative and extra-narrative dynamics that results in the creation of Buffy the product or phenomenon, as opposed to Buffy the innovative television genre-buster.

J. Gordon Melton

Playing with Dracula: Joss Whedon's Creative Adaptation of the Vampire Genre

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western European writers adopted the accounts of vampires from Eastern Europe by transforming the vampire into a character useful for novels, poems and stage productions. This development culminated in Bram Stoker's Dracula, which appropriated Transylvanian folklore to build a picture of vampire. Throughout the twentieth century, the chapter 17 of Dracula (with supporting comments elsewhere in the novel) became for all intents and purpose the "orthodox" description of the nature of vampirism.

Through the twentieth century, various authors played with orthodox text, some quite successfully as with Hamilton Dean's placing Dracula in evening attire and the movie's establishment of the Sun as the vampire's deadly enemy. Other authors explored a more natural, rather than supernatural, vampire (Matheson), a more human vampire (Dark Shadows, Anne Rice), or a vampire hero (Vampirella, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro). Deviation from the canon of the Dracula text has become necessary as vampire fiction became more popular (more than half of all vampire novels having been written in the 1990s).

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and its spin-off Angel), Joss Whedon has recreated the vampire with a comprehensive reworking of the image of the vampire that builds upon the work especially of the prominent "new breed" vampire novels of the 1970s (Saberhagen, Yarbro, Rice). He has offered a new mythical framework to explain the existence of vampires and accepted/rejected particular elements of the "orthodox" literary vampire in such a way as to justify the Slayer, allow a vampire community to exist, and perpetuate ongoing warfare in the face of an oblivious public. This highly creative recasting of the literary vampire has been one key to the continued success of Buffy, as opposed to more limited adaptations that are exhausted in one story.

J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D.

Director

Institute for the Study of American Religion

Santa Barbara, California

Gatti and Ribero

The Buffyspeak: the journey of cultural references, play on words and neologisms from the English original to other European languages, and Italian in particular, via the constraints imposed by dubbing and subtitling.

The translation of Buffy The Vampire Slayer presents the translator with very peculiar problems, not only because of the cultural references that need to be rendered in a different cultural context but also because what has grown to be known by the fans of the series as the "Buffyspeak" is unique in its own way. In addition to the challenges posed by the translation in itself, the requirements of subtitling and dubbing add to the limits a translator is faced with.

Cultural references:

Here are some of the various categories of cultural references that can be found in Buffy The Vampire Slayer:

·                     References which are specific to the culture and the society of the source language

·                     References understandable by the Buffy audience on an international level

·                     References which are linked not only to the culture but also the generation of the target audience

Neologisms, play on words and characterization

The translator needs to render made up words and creative play on words bearing in mind that very often these expressions become peculiar to a character and will be carried on during the series. Hence the need to find means to recreate the peculiarity of every character’s way of speaking in the target language and keep the consistency of the style throughout the series.

The constraints of dubbing and subtitling

The translator needs to be loyal to all the pecularities of the Buffyspeak bearing in mind the constraints of:

·                     dubbing (lip synchronization and time limits)

and

·                     subtitling (readability, space and time limits)

Hence, the task of the translator is to recreate the spirit, the humour and the irony of the original text, bearing in mind all the above references and limits, but without being to rigidly loyal to the source language because what is crucial is to obtain the same overall effect in the target language.

'Deprimere ille babula linter?: crossing over, reading through and puzzling out in the Buffyverse'

Carol O'Sullivan (UEA)

The worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel rest on a foundation of language. The polyglossia of the text encompasses both the language that Buffy and her friends speak, and which can be hard for adults to understand and the arcane languages of spellcasting and incantations, Latinate or Latinesque for the most part, but sometimes stretching back to Sumerian and proto-Bantu. A facility with languages is a survival skill, in a universe where knowledge is power. Acts of translation feature prominently in the narrative, notably in Spike and Drusilla's vampire henchman Dalton's attempts to decipher the Du Lac manuscript in Season Two of Buffy, and the figuring out of the prophecies in Season One of Angel, where the season finale hangs between the two opposed meanings of the word Shanshu, and Season Three of Angel, where the entire season story arc hangs on the interpretation of a word in the prophecy which could variously be interpreted as 'to kill' 'to eat' and 'to devour.' Translation also functions as a major vehicle of suspense; can our heroes translate the inscription and find the artefact before it is too late? Lastly, this paper will consider 'translation' in the sense in which Stephen Donaldson uses it, as moving between dimensions, into a slightly different version of ourselves. Through the looking glass, Angel can walk in sunlight, and Bottom has ass's ears.

Art Pomeroy

"Don't Speak Latin in Front of the Books"

The uses of the classical languages in Buffy in particular display the possibilities of using the ancient world either as a force of conservatism or as a validator for progressive social behaviour. The ancient world appears frequently as a backdrop in Buffy. In the main, this is Mesopotamian or Egyptian mythology in association with magic spells (for instance, the Isis-Osiris connection crossed with the Mummy for the resurrection of the heroine at the beginning of Series 6). Classical myth appears at second hand in the battle between Spike and the ghora demon in the presence of Dawn, recalling Jason and Medea battling the Hydra in Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Latin appears for incantations, both for good and evil, in part because of its use in the rites of the Catholic church (GILES: "What ever happened to Latin? At least when that made no sense, the church approved.") This use of Latin as a half-familiar language, understood only by over-educated (but ineffectual) academics is a standard topos of the horror movie genre (e.g. Martin Balsam in Michael Winner's The Sentinel [1977]), but in "The Yoko Factor" approval is a main theme. Greek is much less common. Although the oracle in Angel has Greek-looking divinities serving it and a modern Greek inscription (The Gate of Lost Souls), as perhaps befits Angelus, the most interesting use is in Buffy. In "Restless" (the coda to Series 4), Willow is portrayed as writing Sappho 1 on Tara's back. The choice of the poetry of the original Lesbian in an episode featuring the first slayer to represent female desire (and the need for reassurance) cannot be accidental. Here there is a sexuality which is not named, which is linked to the kitty (a potential animalism which can be tamed), represented in a positive fashion (contrast the portrayal of lesbians in The Sentinel).

Prof Arthur J. Pomeroy, Classics (Te Tari Ahuatanga Onamata), SACR, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O.Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand

What’s Up With Vampires Anyway (The science of the undead in the Buffyverse)

D.F. Collinson

In this paper it is postulated that while there are a number of features of the Buffyverse vampire that do not occur among the creatures of our world, these features can be explained by the science of our world. While the existence of magic in the Buffyverse is acknowledged, consideration is restricted to common vampires, not special "magical vampires" like Dracula. Where appropriate, reference is made to specific episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". The features considered are (1) the process in which a human corpse is reanimated as a vampire. The extent to which this can be compared to procreation as we know it is considered. (2) The state of the reanimated body in terms of tissue preservation (including a healing process), and activity in the absence of what is regarded as vital function is addressed. (3) The manner in which the bodily functions are maintained by the consumption of blood. (4) The vulnerability of the vampire to destruction by certain causes, and what this tells us about the vampires morphology (e.g. why the stake has to be wood). (5) The rapid anatomical changes of the vampire (e.g. game face and fangs). (6) The manner in which the deceased vampire disincorporates (dusting). (7) The non-reflection of vampires in mirrors. Finally an overview of the nature of the vampire is considered from the viewpoint that that the physics of our Universe cannot be violated by non-magical processes, The chemistry that we know must apply to the substances we are familiar with, and the biology of creatures which stand apart from ordinary evolution must still conform to general principles. Particular consideration will be given to the role of blood.

"It’ll go straight to your thighs": food and drink issues in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel’

Jocelyn Rose

Food and drink plays a significant part in both BtVS and Angel – not only in the vampire-sex-food triangle, but in other metaphorical ways throughout the canon. This paper addresses the various aspects of vampire nutrition – the predatory, the intimate, the industrialised – including the different expedients found by Angel and (from Buffy 4 onwards) Spike to manage their atypical feeding problem, and how they cope when required to eat ‘normal’ food.

I move on to consider the ways in which food and drink is used to contrast the two ‘families’ - Buffy’s and Angel’s – and its use as a signifier for emotional crisis, comparing in particular the home-cooked meal with the takeaway, and addressing the ways in which food is used by Buffy in an attempt to replace her lost mother. This leads to a discussion of the role of ice cream, both as metaphor and as red herring; and of the messages about healthy eating and drinking, and about body image, that run through both series. Connor’s transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of Quor’Toth to total junkfood overload in LA contributes not a little, I contend, to his inability to handle family relationships.

Finally the paper looks at places where people in ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ eat outside the home, with particular reference to the Doublemeat Palace, with its subversion of the usual role of the fast-food joint in the genre, and to the school canteen where, in contrast, the allusion is reinforced by the various perils of snake sandwiches, green Jello and the archetypal evil lunchlady. In these cases food and drink moves from being a supporter and expositor of plot and character development in the two series to becoming a central plot driver in its own right.

Joc Rose is a health promotion officer, proud owner of the entire BtVS/Angel canon on video, and postgraduate student at UEA.

Slaying: The Stakes of the Warrior

by Leslie Ellen Jones, PhD

Mythologist Georges Dumézil theorized that Indo-European mythologies perceive the social world as divided among three "functions": sovereignty (exemplified by the priest-king), force (exemplified by the warrior) and fecundity (exemplified by agriculturalists, artisans, and/or women). In his book The Stakes of the Warrior (1948/1988) and elsewhere, Dumézil identified three "sins" that the warrior, by reason of his vocation, inevitably commits against the society he is sworn to protect: sins against sovereignty, in the form of regicide or disobedience; sins against the warrior ethos, in the form of deceit, treachery, or cowardice; and sins against fecundity, in the form of rape or adultery, or the disruption of the "provisions" that the third function creates. These sins reflect the ambivalent status of the warrior, whose martial prowess is necessary for the defense of his society, but who is also apt, in the frenzy of battle, to forget the distinction between friend and foe, and attack indiscriminately. This paper discusses the ways in which the characters of Buffy, Angel, and Spike reflect aspects of the Indo-European warrior's inevitable sin, especially in light of the fact that one is a woman, and the other two undead. Comparisons are made to characters in the Ulster cycle of Irish mythological tales, such as Queen Medb and Macha (women warriors) and Cú Chulain (whose "warp-spasm" or ríastrad is remarkably similar to the vampire's "game face") as well as to more recent mythological retellings, such as Xena, Warrior Princess. My contact information:

Leslie Ellen Jones

2410 Kansas Ave. #A

Santa Monica, CA 90404 USA

310-828-6692

Neville Morley

Department of Classics & Ancient History

University fo Bristol

11 Woodland Road

Bristol

BS8 1TB.History as Nightmare

‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

‘Let the dead bury their dead, so that we ourselves may not come under the influence of the smell of the corpses.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, We Philologists

Buffy the Vampire Slayer explores and articulates a particular set of attitudes towards the past, characterised above all by fear and anxiety and drawing on a distinctive ‘grand narrative’ of history. Demons, monsters and magic are reminders of the continuing power and threat of the ‘dark ages’ of antiquity; dangerous in themselves, but also striving to return the world to its original ‘hellish’ state. In part this reflects a characteristic American attitude to the corrupting influence of the Old World (numerous episodes portray the threat to our heroine as specifically European in origin), but it also has affiliations with more general discussions of the birth, development and future of modernity and its relationship with the past. Both Marx and Nietzsche present the past as something that can drain human potential, that must be overcome through struggle.

At the same time, of course, both writers offer a far-reaching critique of modernity itself, often drawing upon the past for their rhetorical weapons. Buffy, too, is all too conscious of the dangers posed by unrestrained modernity, especially but not only when technological sophistication is allied with the attitudes and values of the barbaric past. Finally, the programme is not afraid to undercut the American myth of the 1950s as a lost golden age of innocence. The power of the series derives in no small part from its willingness to explore ambiguities and expose unsettling contradictions, not least, as this paper will argue, in our attitudes towards past and present, antiquity and modernity.

Kate Lambert

Working title: "The fool (for love)": Spike as Trickster

Rationale: That the character of Spike can be read as fulfilling many of the requirements of the trickster in folklore. That an understanding of the structural role of Trickster can help us to understand and interpret the character of Spike and his role in BtVS.

Draft outline: First to establish the character of Trickster and (nearly invariably) his role in a number of myth cycles. To outline what makes him unique and distinct from other mythic heroes. To explore the role of the fool in