Comments | persephone_20: Twilight as a University text

persephone_20

Twilight as a University text

Mar 05, 2011 12:16

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 ( Read more... )

Comments 4

emilyjane March 5 2011, 04:39:47 UTC

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 ( ... )

persephone_20 March 5 2011, 10:55:12 UTC

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 :)

aphephobia March 5 2011, 09:05:25 UTC

Funny you should write this: over on FB, I wrote a thing about how it shits me that videogaming is seen as some kind of "lower" entertainment but other forms of storytelling media get university subjects about them.

I can't stand Twilight, but to be fair, I can't stand Jane Austen or Shakespeare either and neither of them were perfect and, like Twilight, were cultural icons anyway.

I just hope people realise that's why there's the interest in studying Meyer: because of the popularity and cultural influence, not because of the quality of the work.

persephone_20 March 5 2011, 11:00:33 UTC

*grins* I was reading something for Honours on Friday that was looking at how archetypes have been taken up by popular video games (Mario Brothers was the example cited, but it was in a textbook and being taken seriously). But yes, that's one line in a paragraph, quite different to a university subject.

Definitely popularity and cultural interest and, in this course's case, its relevance to the Gothic genre. I still don't think that it quite fits into the Gothic genre when put against some of the greats, but I guess this is the best we have to represent for our generation.

Pretty damn depressing, actually :/