Intertextuality in Buffy The Vampire Slayer :: Television Shows TV Essays

Intertextuality in Buffy The lamia SlayerA vivid and realistic outletive experience of TV hammy fiction is almost axiomatic of viewer enjoyment. To feel a personalized engagement with the depicted events, to experience a sense of the fictional home as subjectively real and to become drawn into that space ar arguably defining features of enjoyable television viewing, as they are of subscribe to and of literature. In this paper, I provide argue that certain forms of intertextuality play a key role in producing this experience. In cult TV shows bid Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS), these forms of intertextuality are utilized in abundance, and BtVS is therefore an magnificent vehicle for exploring their psychological impact. Krzywinska (2002) notes that BtVS demands a sophisticated level of engagement by viewers, and that this is encouraged by a number of strategies, including intertextual references. She notes that the show makes many references, for practice to shows much(p renominal) as Xena and the novels of Anne Rice, and that these are Part of a common ethnical phrase that connects characters to a broader real world culture. Such references lend the series a greater sense of meaningfulness, and textual richness, further encouraging discussion betwixt viewers and helping to interlace the Buffyverse with everyday life (p 190). Other references to the real world (for mannikin the fact that Giles is said to have brought many of his books from the British Library, and the frequent use of the Internet) provide an important way of linking the diegetic world to other texts, to history, and to viewers cultural fellowship This is important to the series project of making connections with viewers lives the aim of which is to build a cultural vocabulary gleaned from the real world that is common to both viewers and characters (pp 192 3). For Krzywinska, such devices make the audience attentive and make the viewing experience richer and more than rewarding . However, the argument presented here will be that such intertextuality has further psychological effects that serve to draw the viewer into the fantasy world of BtVS and to step up the feeling of involvement. So that the rewards for the viewer go beyond merely catching the references. At this point, it seems necessary to enter into a brief discussion of what I am assuming by the term the viewer. What follows is fundamentally a textual outline of the positions that BtVS makes available or offers us, and invites us to take up (however, as will become clear, I am in no way suggesting that these subject positions are identificatory in the usual sense.