Worthwhile Stories

"And then there are calls for these foolish essays for conferences. Like, a few years ago there were a lot of people writing about Buffy."
-New Prof.

I tell ya, Tuesdays are turning into my day to be aggravated by academic snobbery. It wasn't bad enough that she had to insult creative writers, now she's going after Joss? Talk about near and dear to my heart...

It's always interesting when pop culture comes up in class because there are always a lot of people in the snobbery camp who then say things like, "Yeah. That's just watering down serious academia." Good grief.

Not only are these folks disregarding those who create the literature they write all these essays about, they're also completely overlooking the fact that, in its day, most of said literature was the equivalent of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The whole point of books is entertainment. That's the soul of it. Jane Austen didn't set out to write Pride and Prejudice just so people two hundred years later could write Marxist analyses. She wrote it to entertain.

Joss writes to entertain. He also explores feminism just as surely as Austen's writing ever did.

Sometimes it seems like English departments define worthwhile stories in terms of how long the author has been dead. The longer, the better, and this TV/movie stuff? Bah! None of it can be worthwhile because there are so many trashy movies and reality shows. Again, blinders - what about all the trashy novels and garbage poems that were being written at the same time Shakespeare (who was, let's mention, the equivalent of Steven Spielberg) was scribbling out his plays? They forget that there's always plenty of poor quality writing going on and being published or performed in any period we study as literature scholars.

Can't we look past "the test of time" and venture into less canonized forms of storytelling? I mean, we've gotten to the point of including women on the list of the worthwhile, is it so much of a stretch to admit that these moving pictures might have something to them?

Of course, seeing as how three of my seven admired writers have either written movies or "sold out" to have their work made into one (in Neil's case, both), you already know what my answer is.