Popular Culture and Philosophy
1 primary work
Book 4
Twenty-three essays by philosophers examine crucial ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Buffyverse. Though the show has already attracted much scholarly attention, this book fully disinters the intellectual issues, the author stating that the main point of the book is to demonstarte that philosophy can bring much to the watching of Buffy. In the tradition of the classic horror films "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" addresses ethical issues that have long fascinated audiences. This finds the ethical and metaphysical lessons in a pop-culture phenomenon. It explains how the nature of the forces of evil continually threaten to surge into our world of everyday decency and overwhelm it. Writer Joss Whedon designed Buffy as a multi-level story with most of its meanings buried in heaps of heavy irony and this book examines if Buffy's religious symbolism can be squared with Whedon's professed atheism. It asks is Buffy a Kierkegaardian knight of faith? What light does the show's treatment of vampires, demons and other weird entities shed on our ethical attitudes to non-humans? Does Buffy's sacrifice of her own life indicate the fatal tendency of feminist ethics to degenerate into self-abnegati