SLAYAGE NOTES - Day One, Part Two & Day Two, Keynote
Slayage Notes
Day One - Part Two
The Intertextual Whedonverse
Casey McCormick - “Paratexts Across the Whedonverse & the Disbursal of Narrative Signification”
· Buffy first to have interactive presence on internet
o Fanvid: “The Whedonverse This is War” <- interconnected nature of narrative
· Paratext: any instance of narrative interaction/discourse
o What we are doing right now!
§ Illuminate, complicate
· Whedonverse its own paratext within a network of paratexts
o Everything is both text and paratext
· Paratext signification- Commentary the Musical
I am not going to lie - Kelpy has a HUGE nerd-crush on Casey. I pretty much was just agog over her and therefore my notes are not up to par. This is what her Dissertation is on. She's incredible.
Dr. Julie Hawk - “Watch how I soar”: Finding Serenity in the Death of the Author and the Death of the Book
· Walsh = Author; Book = Book - which we have to lose to make way for; River = post-text
· Whedon gives ownership to the audience
· River is the ever-changing text
Jess Bowers - Once you do it, the World’s All Different: Season Eight as Adaptation
· Fidelity discourse - used by adaptation critics - how fans address/discuss
· “After these messages, we’ll be right back” - nostalgia and undercutting that nostalgia
· Derrida - “the prestige of the original is created by the copy”
Marc McKee - Topher Brink and Joss Whedon: The Death of the Author as Gift of Narrative Agency
· Topher as surrogate for Whedon
§ Calls into question complicity in taking audience agency
o Director of scenes between Echo/doll & Handler
o Re-using actors likened to Dolls
· “Briar Rose”
o Message of hope - desire to fix story: authorial agency as a possibility
o Birth of the Reader- “fixing” the narrative they are supposed to receive
· Pulse Bomb gives world back narrative
Genre and Narratology
Richard S. Albright - “Creative Treatment of Actuality”: The Pseudo-Documentary and the Whedonverse
· Serenity: documentary-like opening make it that much more jarring when multiple realities are revealed
§ Both in “Documentary Style”
· Alliance/Unification story (Myth)
· Miranda Report (Truth)
· “Man on the Street” - Buffy
· “Storyteller” - Espenson (BtVS)
Mary Ellen Iatropoulous:
Defining Joss Whedon’s Disability Narrative Ethic: The Impairment Arcs of Lindsey, Xander, and Bennett
· Anxiety about Marginalized Spaces and Language
o Interplay (and conflict) between individual and environment
§ Impairment (physical) vs. Disability (social marginalization of the impaired)
o “Lame” - what the person saying it thinks it means
· Characters have the choice to internalize the biomedical/personal tragedy
o Power, Privilege, Able-ism = Evil in Angel
o Lindsey rejects Able-ism
o Bennett impaired within disabling system
§ Chooses personal tragedy narrative: innocent to sadist
· Had the choice - chooses narrative of being broken
o Xander: group is discouraged but he chooses a different narrative
§ Buffy takes biomedical view
§ On-going discussion/negotiation of discomfort
· “Good”
o Allowing selves to negotiate their own narratives
§ (Scoobies)
· “Bad”
o Using humans as spare parts
o Giving into biomedical/personal tragedy narrative
§ (Wolfram & Rossum)
If you pay attention to such things, which I usually don’t ‘cause I’m a slacker, then me telling you that Mary Ellen won the Mr. Pointy award at Slayage this year won’t be a big shock. However - I can vouch: it was the best presentation I saw and I pretty much knew she would win; I don’t know anyone who didn’t vote for her. I (actually) voted for someone else (I’ll let you know when that happens) primarily because I felt that the presentation was damn near as good - and I already knew that Mary Ellen had it in the bag. I always vote for the second-runner-up. I’m not sure if she was, they don’t really reveal things like that, but I hope that someone else voted for their second-favorite just for the sake of giving that person their good energy.
Day Three
Keynote Speaker
Jonathan Gray: Joss Whedon as Undead Author
-
Roland Barthes “Death of the Author” - talk about the Rebirth of the Author
· Discursive entities: “Joss (& Others)”
§ Why bring it back? ▪ How is it possible?
o Strategic killing - author in the way; began with the Romantics fetishization
§ Text impossible to get to
- “Text itself” oxymoron - need to look at the work (Ontology)
o Text is always in the process of becoming
o Need to look at it in full
- When is the author? (At what moments?)
- THEORY:
o Nancy K. Miller
§ Important to give power to women authors - we can kill some authors
§ It’s about giving/taking power
o Foucault
§ Discursive entity - why do we talk about the author
- TV: Author has co-presence with the Reader
o Joss even goes beyond
§ Paradox: In order for the text to be what I want it to be - I have to give it up so that YOU can make it what you want it to be
o Textual Identity (Post Modern Subject)
o Paratexts: the key creator of meaning
§ Aka: trailers tell you how to read the texts
· Opening credits and fan-created credits: changes meaning
^ How do we know preferred meanings?
§ Merchandise: what meanings opened/downplayed?
- Clusters of Authorship
· Look at powerful moments of meaning making
o What worth is the author?
§ Sites of meaning
· Joss tells audience how he wants them to read his texts> eve if the texts do not always support that meaning
§ Legitimacy in cultural artifacts: Knighting the Author
· Need to think about where power is being given
§ Mediator of culture
· Author as victim? Industry victimization
§ Lit Studies -likes to pretend that the Industry doesn’t exist, but in Media Studies we can actually start to acknowledge/talk about it
· We like the author to run interference between Industry and the Audience
· Portal Guardians in the works - people who try to appease PTB
§ Authoring with Authors?
· Utopian scripts - how we author our world by talking about authors - expressing other things
· Why we talk about authors
- Author as Discursive?
o What and Why?
o Why involved at specific times?
o How is a text more “useful” with Joss added to it?
o What do his producers want with him; and what they are communicating?
o What does the press want with him and what are they saying?
o How is Joss repurposed over time; to what end?
o Who fights over Joss? What’s at stake?
§ Random aside: Terry O’Quinn had a large presence on the LOST boards; but publicly told them he needed a break so he could figure out what HE felt about the character
· Discussion:
o Technology and Mass communication linked to resurrection of the Author?
§ Helpful, but not necessarily dependent
o The Author (Joss) wants all of us to be the Author - playing with Authorship
§ “Bring your Own Subtext”, etc.