Lynn Schofield Clark
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195300239
- eISBN:
- 9780199850525
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195300239.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter examines religion's coding in the television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It analyzes how these programs refer to organized religion and to the lore of vampires and how ...
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This chapter examines religion's coding in the television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It analyzes how these programs refer to organized religion and to the lore of vampires and how they embrace a romantic notion about an individual's need for community and her capacity for transformation. It reviews four episodes and explains how the programs express a postmodern, relativistic approach to religious belief.Less
This chapter examines religion's coding in the television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It analyzes how these programs refer to organized religion and to the lore of vampires and how they embrace a romantic notion about an individual's need for community and her capacity for transformation. It reviews four episodes and explains how the programs express a postmodern, relativistic approach to religious belief.
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496804747
- eISBN:
- 9781496804785
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496804747.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The undead are very much alive in the contemporary cultural imaginary. Monsters in general, and vampires and zombies specifically, have garnered a generous amount of attention in print media, cinema, ...
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The undead are very much alive in the contemporary cultural imaginary. Monsters in general, and vampires and zombies specifically, have garnered a generous amount of attention in print media, cinema, and on television. The vampire, with its roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with its origins in Afro-Caribbean voodoo mythology, find multiple transformations in global culture and continue to function as deviant representatives of zeitgeist. As the authors in this volume demonstrate, the transspacial and transtemporal distributions of vampires and zombies have revealed the figures to be highly variable signifiers. Currently, of all monsters, vampires and zombies seem to be the most trendy—the most humanly embodied of the undead and the most frequently paired monsters in the media and popular culture.Moreover, both figures have experienced radical reinterpretation in the context of contemporary cultural concerns. If in the past vampires were evil, blood-sucking exploiters and zombies were brainless victims, they now have metamorphosed into kinder and gentler vampires and cruel, flesh-eating zombies. Further, they have simultaneously contracted and expanded gender, race and class roles, at once confirming and deconstructing these concepts. Although the portrayal of both vampires and zombies can be traced to specific regions and predates mass media, the introduction of mass distribution through film and game technologies has served to significantly modify their depiction over time and in various locations. This volume—authored by scholars from different national and cultural backgrounds—explores some of these transformations the vampire and zombie figures experience when they travel globally and through various media.Less
The undead are very much alive in the contemporary cultural imaginary. Monsters in general, and vampires and zombies specifically, have garnered a generous amount of attention in print media, cinema, and on television. The vampire, with its roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with its origins in Afro-Caribbean voodoo mythology, find multiple transformations in global culture and continue to function as deviant representatives of zeitgeist. As the authors in this volume demonstrate, the transspacial and transtemporal distributions of vampires and zombies have revealed the figures to be highly variable signifiers. Currently, of all monsters, vampires and zombies seem to be the most trendy—the most humanly embodied of the undead and the most frequently paired monsters in the media and popular culture.Moreover, both figures have experienced radical reinterpretation in the context of contemporary cultural concerns. If in the past vampires were evil, blood-sucking exploiters and zombies were brainless victims, they now have metamorphosed into kinder and gentler vampires and cruel, flesh-eating zombies. Further, they have simultaneously contracted and expanded gender, race and class roles, at once confirming and deconstructing these concepts. Although the portrayal of both vampires and zombies can be traced to specific regions and predates mass media, the introduction of mass distribution through film and game technologies has served to significantly modify their depiction over time and in various locations. This volume—authored by scholars from different national and cultural backgrounds—explores some of these transformations the vampire and zombie figures experience when they travel globally and through various media.
Roshanak Kheshti
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479867011
- eISBN:
- 9781479861125
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479867011.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Chapter 2 performs close readings of transcriptions of a nationally syndicated, travel themed radio show—to which Kinship Records president Jon Cohen was a regular contributor—and of the recent ...
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Chapter 2 performs close readings of transcriptions of a nationally syndicated, travel themed radio show—to which Kinship Records president Jon Cohen was a regular contributor—and of the recent popularity of the “Afro-Indie” genre, which is understood as those African-derived musics in U.S. indie rock. This chapter develops the concept of “aural imaginary” as that mechanism through which the aural other is instrumentalized in the constitution of a listening self not simply through appropriation but through incorporation into the subject. This chapter narrows in on sound’s capacity to materially structure social relations, formations, and actors. The WMCI, as represented in Kinship Records, has disassociated itself from the shunned and taboo practice of cultural appropriation and has assumed a new business model, described in this chapter as “aural incorporation.” Aural incorporation represents that means by which listeners structure racialized sounds to which they may have no birthright into their origin narratives laying claim to various musical traditions as their own. This chapter explores these various biopolitical tactics employed by the WMCI.Less
Chapter 2 performs close readings of transcriptions of a nationally syndicated, travel themed radio show—to which Kinship Records president Jon Cohen was a regular contributor—and of the recent popularity of the “Afro-Indie” genre, which is understood as those African-derived musics in U.S. indie rock. This chapter develops the concept of “aural imaginary” as that mechanism through which the aural other is instrumentalized in the constitution of a listening self not simply through appropriation but through incorporation into the subject. This chapter narrows in on sound’s capacity to materially structure social relations, formations, and actors. The WMCI, as represented in Kinship Records, has disassociated itself from the shunned and taboo practice of cultural appropriation and has assumed a new business model, described in this chapter as “aural incorporation.” Aural incorporation represents that means by which listeners structure racialized sounds to which they may have no birthright into their origin narratives laying claim to various musical traditions as their own. This chapter explores these various biopolitical tactics employed by the WMCI.
Christopher Bush
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195393828
- eISBN:
- 9780199866601
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393828.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The second chapter turns from writing-as-image to writing-as-inscription, focusing on Victor Segalen’s Stèles (1912), a prose poem collection that formally emulates the Chinese stone monuments from ...
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The second chapter turns from writing-as-image to writing-as-inscription, focusing on Victor Segalen’s Stèles (1912), a prose poem collection that formally emulates the Chinese stone monuments from which it takes its name. Segalen’s self-conscious and indeed programmatic negation of China into “China” provides both an example and an allegory of Western modernism’s overdetermined relationship to China as both a worldly, historical object of interest and a somehow nonexistent and effectively timeless source of forms. Segalen’s figurations of Chinese writing as inscriptional and essentially nonreferential suggest important general lessons about modernist uses of China as a source of formal innovation, specifically the ways in which these uses corresponded to a more general redefinition of the modernist relationship between “literature” and the death of intention.Less
The second chapter turns from writing-as-image to writing-as-inscription, focusing on Victor Segalen’s Stèles (1912), a prose poem collection that formally emulates the Chinese stone monuments from which it takes its name. Segalen’s self-conscious and indeed programmatic negation of China into “China” provides both an example and an allegory of Western modernism’s overdetermined relationship to China as both a worldly, historical object of interest and a somehow nonexistent and effectively timeless source of forms. Segalen’s figurations of Chinese writing as inscriptional and essentially nonreferential suggest important general lessons about modernist uses of China as a source of formal innovation, specifically the ways in which these uses corresponded to a more general redefinition of the modernist relationship between “literature” and the death of intention.
Stacey Abbott
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748694907
- eISBN:
- 9781474426725
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694907.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Twenty-first century film and television is overwhelmed with images of the undead. Vampires and zombies have often been seen as oppositional: one alluring, the other repellent; one seductive, the ...
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Twenty-first century film and television is overwhelmed with images of the undead. Vampires and zombies have often been seen as oppositional: one alluring, the other repellent; one seductive, the other infectious. With case studies of films like I Am Legend, Daybreakers, and 28 Days Later, as well as television programmes like Angel, In the Flesh, and The Walking Dead, this book challenges these popular assumptions and reveals the increasing interconnection of undead genres. Exploring how the figure of the vampire has been infused with the language of science, disease, and apocalypse, while the zombie text has increasingly been influenced by the trope of the ‘reluctant’ vampire, this book shows how both archetypes are actually two sides of the same undead coin. When considered together they present a dystopian, sometimes apocalyptic, vision of twenty-first century existence.Less
Twenty-first century film and television is overwhelmed with images of the undead. Vampires and zombies have often been seen as oppositional: one alluring, the other repellent; one seductive, the other infectious. With case studies of films like I Am Legend, Daybreakers, and 28 Days Later, as well as television programmes like Angel, In the Flesh, and The Walking Dead, this book challenges these popular assumptions and reveals the increasing interconnection of undead genres. Exploring how the figure of the vampire has been infused with the language of science, disease, and apocalypse, while the zombie text has increasingly been influenced by the trope of the ‘reluctant’ vampire, this book shows how both archetypes are actually two sides of the same undead coin. When considered together they present a dystopian, sometimes apocalyptic, vision of twenty-first century existence.
John Kerrigan
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184515
- eISBN:
- 9780191674280
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184515.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Death is inevitable to every form of life. The slow decay of human flesh is gruesome, but nonetheless intriguing for most tragedy writers. The rituals surrounding burials add to the seduction of ...
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Death is inevitable to every form of life. The slow decay of human flesh is gruesome, but nonetheless intriguing for most tragedy writers. The rituals surrounding burials add to the seduction of death, with various cultures varying in their spiritual and religious rites. Folklore has a different lure, as a man's life defines his fate in the underworld, such that a murderer's final destination will differ from his victim's. Revenge is not uncommon in many of these tales. The chapter looks into early European mythology as well as the vampire cult as a model of works with content which was more or less connected to death. Writings about vampires have a special lure because of its night settings and the predator element contained therein.Less
Death is inevitable to every form of life. The slow decay of human flesh is gruesome, but nonetheless intriguing for most tragedy writers. The rituals surrounding burials add to the seduction of death, with various cultures varying in their spiritual and religious rites. Folklore has a different lure, as a man's life defines his fate in the underworld, such that a murderer's final destination will differ from his victim's. Revenge is not uncommon in many of these tales. The chapter looks into early European mythology as well as the vampire cult as a model of works with content which was more or less connected to death. Writings about vampires have a special lure because of its night settings and the predator element contained therein.
Dale Hudson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474423083
- eISBN:
- 9781474434768
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423083.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book proposes that vampire films and series constitute a different way of understanding Hollywood and the United States. It explores the movement of transnational Hollywood’s representations of ...
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This book proposes that vampire films and series constitute a different way of understanding Hollywood and the United States. It explores the movement of transnational Hollywood’s representations of the vampire, between low-budget quickies and high-budget blockbusters and franchises, even as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas. Vampires allow us to refocus on Hollywood as plural, US history as transnational, and race as having afterlives. The book proposes three overlapping contributions: (1) reconfiguring Hollywood historiography and traditions as transnational in terms of film, television, and web production, distribution, and exhibition/transmission; (2) offering fresh interpretations of vampire film and television as a transgenre (rather than subgenre of horror) and transmedia site for political contestation; and (3) situating constructions of race in/and the United States as constitutive of nation. At the intersection of migration and commerce, vampire films and series are examined for the textual meaning of their stories, characters, styles, and performance and the political economies that determine their production, distribution, and exhibition.Less
This book proposes that vampire films and series constitute a different way of understanding Hollywood and the United States. It explores the movement of transnational Hollywood’s representations of the vampire, between low-budget quickies and high-budget blockbusters and franchises, even as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas. Vampires allow us to refocus on Hollywood as plural, US history as transnational, and race as having afterlives. The book proposes three overlapping contributions: (1) reconfiguring Hollywood historiography and traditions as transnational in terms of film, television, and web production, distribution, and exhibition/transmission; (2) offering fresh interpretations of vampire film and television as a transgenre (rather than subgenre of horror) and transmedia site for political contestation; and (3) situating constructions of race in/and the United States as constitutive of nation. At the intersection of migration and commerce, vampire films and series are examined for the textual meaning of their stories, characters, styles, and performance and the political economies that determine their production, distribution, and exhibition.
Chris Baldick
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122494
- eISBN:
- 9780191671432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122494.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The most vivid representation of the bourgeoisie's doomed state of possession by irresistible forces is to be found in Karl Marx's repeated images of capital as a vampire. After Friedrich Engels had ...
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The most vivid representation of the bourgeoisie's doomed state of possession by irresistible forces is to be found in Karl Marx's repeated images of capital as a vampire. After Friedrich Engels had referred to ‘the vampire property-holding class’ in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Marx adopted the image, developing the apparently gratuitous insult into a consistent element of his gothicized portrayal of the bourgeoisie's compulsive condition. Again, it is the inherent restlessness of the bourgeoisie, as the first great revolutionary class in history, which condemns it to a thirst that can never be quenched. The particular aptness of the vampire image is implied by Marx's term ‘living labour’, which contrasts with the dead (or ‘accumulated’) labour embodied in machinery and raw materials—in short, in capital itself, which thus appears as the rule of the dead over the living.Less
The most vivid representation of the bourgeoisie's doomed state of possession by irresistible forces is to be found in Karl Marx's repeated images of capital as a vampire. After Friedrich Engels had referred to ‘the vampire property-holding class’ in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Marx adopted the image, developing the apparently gratuitous insult into a consistent element of his gothicized portrayal of the bourgeoisie's compulsive condition. Again, it is the inherent restlessness of the bourgeoisie, as the first great revolutionary class in history, which condemns it to a thirst that can never be quenched. The particular aptness of the vampire image is implied by Marx's term ‘living labour’, which contrasts with the dead (or ‘accumulated’) labour embodied in machinery and raw materials—in short, in capital itself, which thus appears as the rule of the dead over the living.
Mollie Gregory
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813166223
- eISBN:
- 9780813166759
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813166223.003.0014
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter is all about high falls—backward and forward. Every fall is different, and the type of fall dictates the position of the airbag the stunt person falls into. Highlighted are stuntwomen ...
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This chapter is all about high falls—backward and forward. Every fall is different, and the type of fall dictates the position of the airbag the stunt person falls into. Highlighted are stuntwomen Sophia Crawford, who started out in Hong Kong doing wirework and later doubled Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as high-fallers Nancy Thurston, Leigh Hennessy, and Lisa Hoyle, who jumped off a ten-story building in Charlie’s Angels (2001). Also examined is the death of Sonja Davis in a backward fall off a building.Less
This chapter is all about high falls—backward and forward. Every fall is different, and the type of fall dictates the position of the airbag the stunt person falls into. Highlighted are stuntwomen Sophia Crawford, who started out in Hong Kong doing wirework and later doubled Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as high-fallers Nancy Thurston, Leigh Hennessy, and Lisa Hoyle, who jumped off a ten-story building in Charlie’s Angels (2001). Also examined is the death of Sonja Davis in a backward fall off a building.
Stacey Abbott
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748694907
- eISBN:
- 9781474426725
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694907.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter offers a brief consideration of the role that the renewed popularity of the vampire and zombie plays within popular culture. Through consideration of the growing popularity of zombie ...
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This chapter offers a brief consideration of the role that the renewed popularity of the vampire and zombie plays within popular culture. Through consideration of the growing popularity of zombie walks, zombie runs, vampire fashion, vampire cosplay, this chapter argues that a fascination with the undead is a response to an unsettling cultural climate in which we are bombarded by the threat of annihilation but also serves as evidence of a cultural appropriation of this apocalyptic threat.Less
This chapter offers a brief consideration of the role that the renewed popularity of the vampire and zombie plays within popular culture. Through consideration of the growing popularity of zombie walks, zombie runs, vampire fashion, vampire cosplay, this chapter argues that a fascination with the undead is a response to an unsettling cultural climate in which we are bombarded by the threat of annihilation but also serves as evidence of a cultural appropriation of this apocalyptic threat.
