ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr . David Lavery

1. ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

3. My colleagues (I teach in an English Department), convinced television is a sinister force destined to destroy literacy and dumb down culture and appalled at my traitorous introduction of its study into hallowed halls that once echoed with the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Conrad, and Faulkner, were not amused when I suggested we tout our rich-in-popular culture course offerings in new promos, updating the old curricular formula, inviting study of “Beowulf to Buffy (and Virginia Woolf, Too).” Not convinced by recent arguments to the contrary like Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, television’s antagonists, in their ignorance, would have us believe the “vast wasteland” offers nothing (with the exception of an occasional Masterpiece Theatre) to the literary minded.

4. Though I am under no illusion they will listen, allow me to survey contemporary television in search of but one manifestation of the literariness the rabid book-loving-TV-haters imagine absent from the medium: the allusion. Allusions, of course, are direct or indirect references in a work of art, usually “without explicit identification, to a person, place or event” or to another work (Abrams 8). Wherever they appear, allusions are, of course, part of that vast and intricate system of intertextuality carefully examined in Jonathan Gray’s recent book. Allusions are not, of course, limited to the literary, even though they carry with them, because of their bookish past, a kind of literary cache.

5. It would, of course, be easy to find in the wasteland allusions to other inhabitants of the wasteland. When Ed Hurley and Agent Cooper visit One-Eyed Jacks in Twin Peaks using the aliases of Barney and Fred, the teleliterate (Bianculli) picking up on a reference to The Flinstones is much easier than understanding the series’ vatic mysteries. When, on Lost, a British businessman buys the Slough branch of the Wernham Hogg paper company, we may not immediately recognize the momentary diegetic intersection with the BBC’s Office, but the allusionary crossing is there to follow nonetheless. I want to examine here not television’s incestuous televisual allusions but its literary ones. For with surprising regularity, the wasteland invokes not just Eliot’s “Wasteland” (Wilcox) but the whole world of literature to which it remains a seldom respected heir.

6. First, consider series like Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998), Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-1992), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-2003)—all series famous for being rife with popular culture references. “It’s so sad. All of your knowledge of high culture comes from Bugs Bunny Cartoons,” Elaine laments to Jerry in the Season Four Seinfeld episode “The Opera,” but the series itself exhibits more than a cartoony awareness of the literary, giving us references to Death of a Salesman (Jerry repeatedly refers to George as “Biff”), The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Salman Rushdie, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, and Tolstoy and War and Peace.

7. Twin Peaks hardly limited itself to movie, television, and music references, though full of them. Remember that discussion of the Heisenberg indeterminancy principle at the Double R Diner? By the series’ premature end, the attentive Peaker had no doubt noticed that Edmond Spenser’s Fairie Queene (Windom Earle and Leo Johnson’s “verdant bower”), the Arthurian legends (Glastonbury Grove, King Arthur’s burial site, is home to the Black Lodge as well), and Knut Hamsun (the Nobel-Prize winning Norwegian novelist and fascist, much admired by Ben Horne), have all set up housekeeping in Twin Peaks.

8. In seven seasons under the creative control of fanboy/comic book geek/pop culture genius Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was crammed with references to television, comics, film, music, and literature. The poetry of Robert Frost, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson; a plethora of books and writers—Alice in Wonderland, The Call of the Wild, Brave New World, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, William Burroughs, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Of Human Bondage, Heart of Darkness, C. S. Forester, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Vanity Fair, The Open Road, Where the Wild Things Are, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ann Rice; and a variety of plays—Oedipus Rex (hilariously performed in a talent show in Season One), The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman (a dream version with a cowboy and a vampire), all these and more put in cameo appearances in Sunnydale.

9. In Buffy’s most extraordinary allusional moment, in the astonishing “Restless,” an episode made of four dream sequences, Willow inscribes Sappho’s lesbian poem “Mighty Aphrodite” on her lover Tara’s naked back.

10. Not surprisingly, the Buffy spinoff Angel makes abundant use of literary allusions as well. I will limit myself here to only one. In a Season One episodethe series’ titular hero, an over-two-centuries-old vampire, is forced to briefly masquerade as a docent in an art museum. Luckily he has personal knowledge of the painting before which he stands:

11. And this brings us to Manet's incomparable La Musique Aux Tuileries, first exhibited in 1863. On the left one spies the painter himself. In the middle distance is the French poet and critic Baudelaire, a friend of the artist. Now, Baudelaire . . . interesting fellow. In his poem “Le Vampyre” he wrote: “Thou who abruptly as a knife didst come into my heart.” He, ah, strongly believed that evil forces surrounded mankind. And some even speculated that the poem was about a real vampire. (He laughs) Oh and, ah, Baudelaire's actually a little taller and a lot drunker than he's depicted here. • Perhaps the first mention on television of the French symbolist poet and drug enthusiast, but then again Angel may well have been the first television character who knew Baudelaire personally.

12. Literary allusions crashed on mystery island along with the survivors of Oceanic 815 in ABC’s huge international hit Lost. Not only are well known philosophers—England’s John Locke and France’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau—evoked by character names, several books become images in the frame, including Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and Richard Adams’ Watership Down, and still others—Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon,and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—are clearly brought to mind.

13. Seen in “Not in Portland” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

14. Seen in “Maternity Leave” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

15. Seen in “A Tale of Two Cities” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

16. Books on The Island/In the Diegesis Seen in “Catch-22”

17. Seen in “Par Avion” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

18. Seen in “The Man from Tallahassee” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

19. Seen in “Eggtown” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

20. Seen in “Maternity Leave” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

21. Seen in “Flashes Before Your Eyes” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

22. Seen in “The Long Con” • “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” • “The Damn Thing” • “A Psychological Shipwreck” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

23. Seen in “Every Man for Himself” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

24. Seen in “He’s Our You” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

25. Seen in “Orientation” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

26. Seen in “Orientation” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

27. Seen in “316” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

28. Seen in “Confidence Man” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

29. Seen in “Numbers” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

30. Seen in “Eggtown” Books on The Island/In the Diegesis

31. Ancestor Texts

32. Ancestor Texts

33. Ancestor Texts Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

34. Ancestor Texts

35. Ancestor Texts

36. Ancestor Texts

37. Ancestor Texts

38. Ancestor Texts

39. Ancestor Texts

40. Ancestor Texts

41. Ancestor Texts

42. Ancestor Texts

43. Lost Philosophers: John Locke

44. Lost Philosophers: David Hume

45. Lost Philosophers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

46. Lost Philosophers: Jeremy Bentham

47. Since, until recently, television routinely kept its episode titles to itself, it has been easy to miss the many literary references to be found there, then and now. Consider, for example, the final episode of the short-lived but watershed ABC series My So Called Life (1994) entitled “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”—a somewhat obscure allusion to a book of the same name by the American poet and writer Delmore Schwartz;

48. or the Steinbeck-evoking pun in the title of an upcoming Veronica Mars episode “The Rapes of Graff” (compare to The Simpsons’ “The Crepes of Wrath”);

49. or The Gilmore Girls’ “Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller,” with its reference to the Henry James novella (one of a score of literary show titles in the series);

50. or “The Betrayal,” Seinfeld’s famous “backward” episode, which takes its title from Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s similarly-themed (though opposite in tone) play of the same name.