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Reading the Vampire Slayer, edited by Roz Kaveney. I.B. Tauris, 265 pages, $14.95.
Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, edited by Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery. Rowman & Littlefield, 320 pages, $24.95 (paperback), $69 (cloth).
Every Tuesday night during my senior year at college, about 10 people would gather in my living room. My housemates Peter and Sarah fought over who got to sit in the pale orange chair with its own footstool in the corner. Jamie, another housemate, always claimed the right side of the oversized amber couch, while Peter's friends Andy and Danielle tucked themselves into the other side. Sam sat on the love seat on the right wall, and Kim, our resident Alaskan, was usually content on the floor.
By 7:50 p.m., everyone was assembled. Chitchat and joke-telling ensued, until the first guitar chords of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song began--then we sat in reverential silence. Phones went unanswered. If an uninitiated guest dared to make a comment-- any comment--before a commercial break, they were quickly shushed by the group at large and could expect dirty looks from Jamie for the rest of the night.
Make no mistake: This was not the kind of gathering familiar to college kids across the country, a group assembled to ridicule Felicity or Dawson's Creek or Beverly Hills 90210, shows that were supposed to depict some facet of our lives and failed pathetically. Buffy was different. Buffy was television to be taken seriously, television that functioned as literary text replete with rhetorical figures, symbolism, foreshadowing, metaphor. And despite the fact that it was about a skinny blonde with superhuman powers, it was television in which we could actually see our own struggles and issues reflected back at us.
The show takes literally the old adage "High school is hell": Buffy battles her teenage problems--represented in...