Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great collection of academic essays on Buffy, September 13, 2003
There is no such thing as a perfect anthology, but by any reasonable standards, this one is first rate. The inherent problem with the anthology is that its contents are comprised by the contributions of a number of individuals. On the one hand, not every reader will find all the essays in any anthology of equal interest, while on the other, not every essay in a collection is going to be on the par of every other selection. In FIGHT THE FORCES, this is as true as well. The volume is edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, the editors for the online journal SLAYAGE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUFFY STUDIES (www.slayage.tv).As both a lover of Buffy and an academic, I have been somewhat surprised and delighted with the embrasure of Buffy/Angel by academics and intellectuals. At the moment, there are three academic anthologies on Buffy currently available, and three more that I know of on their way (Christopher Weimer's forthcoming MONSTERS AND METAPHORS: ESSAYS ON BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, Lisa Parks's RED NOISE: TELEVISION STUDIES AND BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and Glenn Yeffeth's SEVEN SEASONS OF BUFFY: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WRITERS DISCUSS THEIR FAVORITE TELEVISION SHOW, which should be out just a few days from the moment I am writing this review). What is most amazing about all this interest is that none that I have encountered is at all dismissive of television as a medium, as so many who write on TV shows are. All these writers assume that a truly great television show can warrant as much or more attention that a great movie or the body of work of a great film director. As of this moment, I would rate FIGHTING THE FORCES as one of the two finest academic books available on Buffy, along with Roz Kaveney's READING THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and above James South's BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER AND PHILOSOPHY. Most of the essays in this collection are at least interesting, and several are fascinating. Though at a disadvantage to the South collection by having been written with only knowledge of the fifth season, the essays all have relevance beyond. My favorite essays tended to be in the first section, entitled "Forces of Society and Culture: Gender, Generations, Violence, Class, Race, and Religion." Many of the essays are exceptional. Some are less than gripping, and one, a Jungian analysis of the dreams in Buffy, is one of the hardest-to-ingest essays I have ever read (I have decided that I must be completely immune to the purported charms of Jung). For Buffy fans, I would recommend that only those with some academic proclivities give this book a try. Understanding academic articles doesn't depend on intelligence as much as habit, and if one hasn't worked through a number of academic essays before this, it isn't likely to be much fun or shed any insight on Buffy. On the other hand, academics who remain disdainful of Buffy probably need to go work through at least the first five seasons of Buffy and the first two of Angel before giving this collection a whirl.
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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cogent, scholarly, entertaining, August 13, 2002
Now, let me start by saying that I don't typically read scholarly books about television series. Quite frankly, most of them are just chock-full of flowery, useless speech and precious little actual information or well-argued opinion.I picked up this book because I'm a huge fan of Buffy and I wanted to see how badly a bunch of academics would mangle the themes and structures Joss & Co. employ on a weekly basis. Odd as this sounds, I was disappointed to find myself greatly enjoying each and every essay. Now, not each one is a perfect gem and a couple of them made me wonder if the writer had ever actually sat through and enjoyed a single episode, but some of those essays were the most entertaining because they were quite thought-provoking. I would recommend this book to anyone who's a long-time viewer of the show, regardless of academic experience, although it doesn't hurt to have a B.A. in something under your belt. This book receives four stars simply because of a few minor grammar and spelling errors. In any other book, I'd let it slide, but this is supposed to be made by real professionals and should be perfect in that regard.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a solid body of academic work on the series, November 6, 2003
As a collection of critical essays on pop culture, I'd probably only give this 4 stars, but this is head and shoulders above the rest in comparison with the other collections of Buffy academia I've slogged through lately. (Reading the Vampire Slayer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy - both good in their own right, but rather unpolished).This collection has both the widest number of topics, and some of the best written essays on the show I've read. We get the usual ones like feminism, female representation, and race, as well as some extremely interesting ones on language uses and a nice homage to the creator. Like all collections of this type, there's a nice hefty appendix of sources and references, mostly online due to the relative lack of published work, but a surprising amount of them reference 'ordinary' fans (those of us without a PhD. in media studies). We also get a nice healthy examination of fanfiction and the fan dynamic, unlike one rather anemic essay in another volume. If you're having a hard time deciding how to get into cultural critisism, ignore the rather stuffy cover and check this out.
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