Twilight as a University text

[persephone_20]

Unwittingly, the post I copied and pasted to my journal yesterday turned towards discussions of Twilight and themes found therein. The night before, I was sitting around a table with friends, discussing viewings of vampire related movies and series for a uni class in which one of the texts is Twilight. This morning, I found a post relating to

Comments

[emilyjane]

You've got an interesting point regarding the dearth of contemporary texts. After Twilight, the most recently published text I've studied is Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, published in 1996. Then there were a few published in the 1960s, but other than that it's been a few early 20th century, a bunch of 19th century, some Renaissance, and a few others of in-between eras.

I don't quite agree with the starkness of the picture you've painted, but there's still certainly a bias toward the "classic" or canonical writers. I think it's partly to do with the conservative elitism that the Academy was founded on, and also partly staff and student preconceptions about what's worthy of study. The class I took last year on Renaissance writers was apparently very unpopular with students when it was just focused on little-known women writers, but shot up in popularity when Paul added Shakespeare to the syllabus.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how possible it is to work to radical ends within the Academy, given how essentially conservative it still is. The master's tools and all that. But then I think I've got to at least try, because the alternative is ceding the place to the likes of Harold Bloom and Keith Windshuttle, and that's just untenable.

[persephone_20]

Oh, quite so. I'm having a bit of fun reinterpreting what is 'scholarly' as well, given that I'm studying not only really recent texts within my Honours thesis, but also those aimed at younger readers. None with the popularity of Twilight, of course, since that pretty much leaves me with Harry Potter, but outside of conservative scholarly attention for sure :)