Blockchain Papers

Jean-Michel Dalle

This article suggests that, by looking at Gothic cathedrals as examples of early moonshots, we might gain actionable insights into the contemporary production of moonshot goods. It argues that Early Gothic cathedrals emerged from decentralized, sequential and uncertain experiments, associated with knowledge spillovers. Extending this lens to contemporary venture-backed moonshots, especially in deep-tech, where multiple principals also finance experiments under uncertainty, it suggests that hybrid policy instruments could contribute to harnessing collective venturing toward more mission-oriented, transformative outcomes.

Minner, Brooke Elise

Similar to Dracula, and published the same year in 1897, The Beetle follows a reverse colonization narrative and is filled with characters which reference British modernity, such as “the new woman,” the quote-un-quote Eastern other, and a detective trained in forensic science. However, rather than following a seductive, Vampiric aristocrat, Marsh’s plot follows a shapeshifting Beetle-like character which spends the length of the novel dominating and outwitting these supposed symbols of British progress. In the end however, rather than being staked in the heart and providing readers with empirical proof of Dracula’s demise, the only thing Marsh provides readers with is a pile of bloodied rags. While the Beetle is technically out of sight by the novel’s end, Marsh’s detective never solves the mystery of the text. This open-ended resolution, and seeming reversal of the reverse colonization narrative itself, continues to puzzle Victorian scholars. In this project I argue that one way to solve this puzzle is to perform what scholars Ronjaunee Chaterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong term an “undisciplined” reading the novel, or, to contribute to the project of radically re-making the field of Victorian studies by engaging across disciplines and elevating Pan-Africanist voices. In my reading of The Beetle, I center anticolonial voices like Duse Mohammed Ali and Edward Said, while also putting the text in conversation with disciplines such as disabilities studies, disability rhetoric, and biopolitics. Ultimately, this project read the Beetle’s character as representative of the epistemic violence which British subjects unknowingly or even willingly accept—even to their own detriment—at the end of the nineteenth century.

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers

No abstract is available for this record.

Vojtěch Sadil

The paper is aimed at a very accurate topic which is problematic of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The main aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential of this most important cryptocurrency to serve as full-value money. The matter of the first chapter is introducing the Bitcoin concept including its characters and history. In this phase, we are thinking about Bitcoin as a commodity. The analysis of cryptocurrency Bitcoin within currency relations framework is subject for next chapter. Each commodity, which has a role of money, must fulfil three criteria. This commodity must be convertible, relative stable and liquid. This paper discusses the evaluation of these aspects. Based on the analysis, we can contribute to the question whether bitcoin can be used as full-value money in the future. The paper is not concerned on technical aspects like the algorithm of mining, blockchain technology or account safety.

Mary Hallab

If, as many critics assert, vampires embody our “worst fears,” they also stand for our deepest wish—not to have to die. In their folklore origins, vampires were part of a folk science of disease and death. They have not lost this association. With the advent of modern medical science, vampires did not simply disappear but instead proliferated and evolved to fill varied and complex roles in popular literature, almost always related to their ability to defeat death. At the same time, popular belief in the inevitability of suffering and the necessity of death, based in a firm Christian, (usually) conservative fatalism, gradually faded to be replaced by an even firmer conviction in the power of medical science to prevent disease and prolong life expectancy. Doctors play a role in the escalating battle in much vampire literature between science and the occult—and not always on the side of science. Because vampires are human, and their longevity is a medical anomaly, they are, even in fiction, a natural object of medical curiosity and speculation. In vampire literature, doctors frequently accompany vampires as commentators, antagonists, or observers, representing science and its transformations and accomplishments for good or evil, enacted in the vampire. Paradoxically, the doctor figures both assert the positive and curative value of science, while at the same time casting doubt on the power of science in a world controlled by mysterious occult forces. Where there was no medicine or no doctors to explain death, or prevent it, rural people relied on their own traditional medicine, which included both natural and supernatural elements—warding off vampires with garlic or crosses, for example. Hungarian folklorist Tekla Domotor (1981) says that for rural people, “taking a keen interest in the supernatural was in reality also a means of conducting scientific inquiry” (14–15).1 It is not entirely unreasonable, as Paul Barber points out, that this inquiry included blaming death on the dead, especially in the case of contagious diseases (3). In Eastern Europe or Greece, when a vampire was said to be killing people or causing other calamities, a self-appointed vampire expert could, often for a fee, prevent or stop these depredations according to traditional methods. But one vampire event in the 1700s reveals—indeed, plays a role in—how a whole worldview was changing, as superstitious or religious explanations were replaced by rational scientific investigation. In a Serbian village, villagers accused deceased soldier Arnold Paul (who had claimed to have been bitten by a vampire in earlier years) of coming out of his own grave, attacking villagers, and spreading a vampire epidemic. He did so in a manner wholly in accord with traditional expectations and was eventually dispatched with the prescribed methods. Two waves of vampire scares devolved from this circumstance. In both cases (3 weeks later and 40 days later), the body was disinterred and surgeons present attested, according to the obvious symptoms, that Paul was indeed a vampire. In the second case, one of the surgeons, an Austrian Field Surgeon Johannes Fluckinger, issued an official report in 1732 that created a media sensation all over Western Europe (Melton 518–19). In his study Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origin of an Enduring Legend (2010), Mark Collins Jenkins speculates that, whereas tales from the East about revenants were fairly common, this one report of “scientific observations” attracted Enlightenment scholars because a conclusion by a reputable doctor seemed to acknowledge that vampires might actually exist: It kindled “a fierce debate throughout the German academic and medical establishment” as to the reality of such fantastic beings who could defeat death (Calmet 237–40; Jenkins 111). These accounts of vampires, that sent shockwaves in the West, were not myths or tales of yore like the Greek stories of lamiae or Goethe's “The Bride of Corinth” (1797), but were accounts of real people, known in their communities, with families, and names—who might really have come out of their graves. Ironically, Arnold Paul's case among others brought these “real” vampires into modern medical science—and killed them. Even the Church-appointed vampire investigators Dom Augustine Calmet and Giuseppe Davanzati, looking at this and similar cases, were inclined to regard vampires as a generally harmless superstition. (Otherwise, they would present a serious theological conundrum.) In 1749, Pope Benedict rejected vampires as “fantasy.” And, in a triumph for natural science, after a survey by her personal physician Gerhard Van Sweiten in 1755 and 1756, the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa condemned vampire belief as “superstition and fraud.” She removed the consideration of phenomena “not readily explainable in natural terms” from the authority of the clergy to that of government officers and decreed punishments for those who desecrated corpses (Frayling, 29–30; Jenkins 116–17). Debunked by medical science, vampires were demoted to mere superstition, but they did not go away. Instead they became literature. These fabled walking corpses inspired the literary vampires of Western Europe that became part of the fascination with decay, death, and the occult that we associate with the Romantic Movement. Although elevated in social status and appearance, the vampire retained from the past the ghastly and dangerous character of the grave. At the same time, the vampire's medical examiner or hunter or slayer slowly morphed into a more assured and competent expert, perhaps like the sorcerer in Raupach's “Wake Not the Dead” (1823),2 and soon, into an educated scientific physician like the sympathetic Dr. Heselius whose papers retell the story of Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872) and convince us to accept her account. Literary vampires are talkative and often quite intelligent, fully aware of the hardships of their problematical existence in the complexities of the real and ever-changing world in which they often find themselves waking. For vampires do have their problems: outcasts from society, caught between the actual and the supernatural, clinging to a human consciousness and sense of self, they yet feel themselves pulled toward the darkness of evil and death. Vampires are set off against, destroyed, or sometimes saved, by the solid, sensible, reliable presence of the doctor, whose job is to know about them and to tell us what we can expect from them. For our vampires now are part of our folklore that, with the help of their varying casts of victims, slayers, and doctors, change and develop into what we, their audience, need or want them to be—sexy, powerful, clever—and physiologically possible. So, although actual belief in vampires has never run high in Western Europe, these fanciful literary figures have “arisen” with science and scientific speculation—that, ironically, requires belief. Vampires provide a focus of speculation for the dreams that modern medicine has created for us. Much vampire literature is a kind of science fiction; hence, the doctor—with the vampire as his double or opposite—or even his victim—demonstrates, to some (admittedly rather vague) degree, our own evolving understanding of medical research and practice, our faith in it (or lack thereof), and our expectations for the future. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when news of vampires traveled to Western Europe, expectations of medical technology were already high. In her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein (1831), Mary Shelley tells us about the inception of Doctor John Polidori's influential story “The Vampyre” (1819), along with her own novel about Doctor Frankenstein's monster, in the ideas that Byron and Shelley discussed on that famous stormy night in Geneva in 1816. These concerned the restoration of life through scientific endeavor, not through religion or magic, but by means of electricity, suspected by many to be the “Life Force” that pervaded the universe–a belief promoted by the pseudo-scientific electrical cures practiced by Anton Mesmer and his followers as well as more scientific experiments, for example, those of Luigi Galvani, recently popularized in a series of lectures by Sir Humphrey Davy at the Royal Society. But although both Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's Lord Ruthven suggest that making life from dead body parts, or bodies, may not be such a good idea, the fantasy has persisted and has had to be repeatedly crushed as impracticable or even immoral, as it is in so many works, from Raupach's “Wake Not the Dead,” to Stoker's Dracula (1897), to the rampaging dead in the movie Re-Animator (1985). Doctors, in and out of the literature, have been the inventers and popularizers of vampires. Dr. John Polidori, at the time the youngest doctor to graduate from Edinburgh Medical School, accompanied Byron to Geneva in 1816 as his personal physician. As David MacDonald depicts him, he was immature and vain and thought himself as great a poet as Byron, but his efforts to chummy up to Byron were rebuffed. His “Vampyre,” based on a fragment of a story begun by Byron, is clearly an attack on Byron in the character of the vampire Lord Ruthven. The popularity of Polidori's story established the Byronic Hero/Villain (Byron's own creation) as the archetype for thousands of vampires to come, from any number of nineteenth-century melodramatic villains or heroes to Lugosi to the present—Edward Cullen, for example, in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. So, ironically, two living doctors were responsible for the character of our vampire mythology: Dr. Fluckinger brought the vampire into Western Europe in the report of Arnold Paul, which was sensationalized in the press and discussed in such reputable studies as the work of Dom Augustin Calmet, Yet, we might also say that Doctor John Polidori, through his influential story, was the actual creator of the vampire as we know him—handsome, suave, sophisticated, and malign. Vampires often do bad things—kill people, for example. But the most shocking evil of these “monsters” is that they are supernatural humans resurrecting themselves, climbing out of the grave—defying the laws of God and Nature. In addition to their dangerous behavior and disconcerting presence, vampires (folkloric and fictional) seem evil to many because they obscure the forbidden boundary between soul and body, spirit and matter, and thus undermine “a sound predictable reality.” This, of course, is what the Romantics so admired. But according to Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, even in our day, Gothic beings like Brunhilda in “Wake Not the Dead” or Dracula, in cahoots with sorcery or science, blot out our neat Christian dualism between good and evil (35). Grisly, Gothic, unnatural medical investigations or treatments that seem to cross heretofore physically impassable boundaries, like stem cell research, cloning, or organ transplants, are repugnant to many as a prideful playing at God that will come to no good. According to W. Scott Poole, modern vampires (like Blade, for example, who needs constant medical attention) embody these anxieties that modern medical technology will make us into something unnatural, inhuman cyber-beings, robots, heartless and evil (Poole 221, 223). One kind of “unnatural” crossing of boundaries in the real world began in the seventeenth and continued through the nineteenth centuries (until even now)—in the mysterious cures of Anton Mesmer. Mesmer convinced many people that treatments with invisible forces like magnetism, that is, electricity (considered by many to be the “Life Force”) and with hypnotic trances would ultimately put an end to all illnesses and prolong life. Think of Poe's story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), in which a corpse is hypnotized to remain sentient and whole (more or less) until the spell is broken. Eventually, Mesmeric healers used only their own “natural magnetism” conveyed to the patient by touch and suggestion to diagnose illnesses, to anesthetize even severe pain, and even to effect cures. According to Alison Winter in her book Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998), in the nineteenth century a rather unpleasant medical controversy arose: a number of researchers attempted to demonstrate through mesmerism that the mind, will, soul, and spirit were all just physical things—and others, with similar mesmeric carryings-on, demonstrated the opposite, that is, that the spirit determined the body's well being. In this kind of well-publicized medical context rose Rymer's hypnotic Varney the Vampire (1847), Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872), and Stoker's Dracula (1897).3 Dracula often behaves like a mesmerist controlling his victims with the power of his will—as does Dr. Van Helsing. Indeed, the battle of wills between Dracula and Van Helsing seems to reenact the kinds of roaring conflicts described by Winter, between the mesmerists who saw the practice as a kind of electrical projection or even mystical imposition of power from the stronger to the weaker and the more scientific view that the victim (or patient) willingly gave up her or his will to the dominance of another. This medical contest of wills plays out in any number of Dracula spin-offs, as the vampire mesmerizes the weaker characters—but not the strong-minded doctor, who will not relinquish his self-control. Thus, a medical phenomenon highly publicized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides the “lore” of hypnotic or mind control powers—even mental telepathy—for modern vampires.4 Another medical mystery of mind (or soul) and body drawn on in vampire literature was, and still is, determining what death is—that is, when one might know for sure when a body is actually dead. Traditional vampire belief and modern vampire fiction depend on the survival of a more or less intact dead body moved by some sort of conscious animating force that is a fair representation of the living personality—and on someone's ability to detect if it is a vampire. According to Philippe Aries, by the eighteenth century, diagnoses of death (Is he really dead?) and discussions of its nature and its meaning for body and soul—the very essence of vampire literature—were increasingly the concern of doctors rather than clergy. And there was much debate among doctors about the point at which death actually occurs—that is, when does the soul leave the body? (Aries 353–60) This problem became even trickier in the nineteenth century when, because of the many epidemics and plagues suffered in Europe, fear of contagion from the dead led to stringent regulations about the prompt and secure burial of bodies. This in turn led to the fear of being buried alive that obsessed so many in the nineteenth century. Some scholars have speculated that the few “real” vampires reported in these years were simply the result of over-hasty burials like that of Poe's Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) (Jenkins 85–92). By the eighteenth century, dead bodies themselves became the object of serious scientific study. The medical profession regarded dissection as essential to valid medical research and paid highly for fresh corpses, discretely obtained. Grave robbing, or “body snatching,” or even murder for bodies became a lucrative business for some “resurrection men” like the infamous William Burke and William Hare (1827–1828; Jenkins, 76–78). This environment of sensational disappearing corpses provides a believable Gothic context for vampire fiction and its need for doctors. Doctors can stand as reliable witnesses to the vampire phenomenon because they are assumed to have useful factual knowledge about human bodies and their capabilities. In Varney the Vampire, Doctor Chillingworth is there to tell us that, no matter what he claims, Varney is not a vampire. Chillingworth knows this because he paid the hangman for Varney's supposed corpse for medical study, that he then galvanized into life. And besides, as a rational scientist, he knows that there are no such as vampires. In Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872) is by being by a Doctor Stoker's Dracula most of the Dracula out of this Victorian when Europe was still by illnesses and epidemics whose nature and were yet One such an for much of his His stories about the and the in that The effect of these tales in his own story “The in which a is the of off as it her only by being very and good. Stoker's fear of death is the this and other such as The of the for most of our But it that there is not much from Even as Van Helsing to he is it by the vampire's many living is Dracula as an battle between science and the and but who which of these is sometimes to Varney and Dracula are about scientific as it to what we can know and what we can not is their two of scientific by their In Doctor Chillingworth is a rational of science he on of Varney's supposed supernatural existence and scientific means of for the Stoker's Doctor Van in the essence of science to be to any about the physical His his and his high expectations and that science had in to its to Van science had out because it had to what could be and instead of us in that to an mind and not a of the of a Medical science could explain such as the and bodies and were not so Van Dracula can be at a of and a natural being whose ability to death as reported will be as natural In his to Dr. Van Helsing the vampire's existence by to such as an or to a that more to a popular scientific idea, or which he might have a role in the of some or of or that might have help As he it, even with at the was a matter of to do not to on some supernatural essence that only God could that to In the Stoker's Dracula is not by a or by some as in or even by a doctor a but is killed with a by the as a result of the knowledge and of this sometimes but well For all his and like Van Helsing on science, on physical and in Christian and even Stoker's Gothic Dracula and his doctors have continued to and to any number of and many of them to and the complex and of medical science and nature and the Even the well known of Dracula, the presence of a doctor in a vampire movie or book our and us of the by his in of their vampires are human and to which may not always be rational and Chillingworth might but which is often and and in for natural and the of vampires in and literature, and the defeat of vampires a defeat of these natural can be if only we know are good a of science and medicine and is along even into our and their In the movie a to the of in the the vampire is the which not with and but with the of the vampire by the and the of in Dracula as well as the the vampire something like a that is contagious and that can be by of the to the Thus, Van in Stoker's novel the of vampires as natural beings that do not or but remain by and and are to human understanding and in the of the medical as by for example, in the The even vampire and doctor more varied and complex as their mysterious ability to and their and for in vampire literature, the of good and evil, occult and even life and death, to and Some vampire literature of science and about doctors. For one the and of the two may have convinced that death and not in supernatural but in scientific that killed more than they course, even earlier doctors are not all Chillingworth in Varney a rather toward the victims and the vampire he has that of faith in authority and and human of any kind of scientific or religious and doctors to in vampire literature. In the German not to Dracula, a doctor his profession and the of his to provide victims for the who is like of in doctors and medical science is The of the Vampire The and and doctor is a But doctor Dr. who is in reality Dr. a as the result of an for has himself into a vampire much for the value of In the does not on medical science to this vampire a German but the that has in the of his to come to The vampire's evil, like that of is that is, of natural which can also be and and of no to in a doctor useful to provide a to this vampire's traditional and the vampire well as to any that this has into the Dracula in the of his for the doctor to scientific into the for in the century, the vampire may have been not by but by a or a by or as in novel Legend and its movie or by the of an doctor as in novel The epidemics like in the or fear of or related to the result in the of or movie vampires into and even modern medical research is course, most people go to vampire not for a science (or but for the the even the that the fear of the vampire to the of the Gothic supernatural with something like medical science The series of vampire provides an of the value of medical science and with The of Dracula Although Gothic, with and Dracula, this movie seems to the scientific with as a Van who is not by and and who the to and garlic to be But in the the between science and mystical in of the Vampire in which a Dr. up of to the evil vampire Dr. and his In Dracula from the Grave Christian that the to the on a In at the end of the in The of Dracula Dracula medical research to a with the of over the on the of the to be by Dr. Van Helsing with a would the to the medical in the and at the same time that science fiction was so In the their are or of Stoker's and their science is a of to electricity, and science of the nineteenth century as Van Helsing might have known It is the same we so often in the media to us as science, like in or it also our own about what to natural the object of scientific and what It the kind of occult that many have come to the and of the and the of the to much about says of literature in that it of a of the scientific understanding on we view the Indeed, he much literature of the past stories of with the supernatural that science, doubt on the of human and out that science was and that there were of of or It was, he rather of traditional because of the mysterious and mystical so many seemed to of and to The popularity of literature of fantasy and the occult that the is not to with his for or it may As the faded in the they were being replaced by even and more mysterious Gothic vampires of whose presence is only with a and is like to the of a and Vampire But science has no in these from with the Vampire to the no rational or is even by and with his Stoker's Dracula in which a Van and crosses, is almost more Gothic and than Dracula, who as a But Dracula into a and By this time, perhaps the of of a of vampire literature

Patrick R. Casey

Hallab, Mary Y. Vampire God: The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 169 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-4384-2860-4. $24.95. Mary Hallab pushes her way into the already crowded shelves of vampire criticism with Vampire God: The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture, an academic examination of the appeal of vampires in Western culture. Vampire Gods is a fairly short work--only 136 pages, excluding endnotes--but it covers a lot of ground as she examines folkloric and literary vampires. Rather than relying on definitions that reduce vampires to symbolic manifestations of desires or political ideologies, Hallab focuses on the vampire's liminal status as creature both human and supernatural (4). This status, Hallab argues, is the very definition of the vampire: it is the one thing all vampires--comic or terrifying, sexy or revolting--have in common. It is also central to the vampire's role as a focus for universal concerns about death [and life] that allows the mind to dwell on possibilities beyond those offered by conventional religion or rational empiricism (6-7). Hallab organizes the text into four main sections: (1) the relation between vampires and science; (2) the social implications of vampires; (3) the psychological implications of vampires; and (4) the religious implications of vampires. The bulk of the text (as implied by the title Vampire Gods) focuses on the last section: religion. However, the vampire's god-like ability to give structure and meaning to life ties all of the sections together. Chapter 1, and Science, illustrates Hallab's strengths as a writer and researcher. Here, as elsewhere in the study, Hallab combines a brief, but compelling review of academic studies with historical and literary examples. Where Hallab excels is in relating a broad, widely accepted concept (i.e., folklore often constitutes a kind of pre-scientific attempt to explain natural occurrences) and then, after noting the myriad variations of that concept, offering her own position (vampires [if accepted as real] offer ... irrefutable proof that the dead are still in some way alive) (17-18). Though there is much new in her analysis, she manages to stake subtle claims on some well-established ideas. She is even more successful at using a broad range of vampire stories to illustrate her point. In chapter 1, for instance, she traces links from the Catholic Church's scientific investigations into eighteenth-century Hungarian vampires to classic literary vampires such as Varney and Dracula, modern vampire dramas such as Forever Knight and Dark Shadows, and at least seven other lesser-known literary manifestations. It is a lot to cover in fifteen pages, but Hallab manages it without eliding too many complexities. Chapter 2, and Society, extends the commonplace concept that folkloric vampires reinforce communally shared beliefs [and] ... provide ties with the family and community past (33) into an analysis of literary vampires serving similar functions. Whether inspired by historical figures or other vampires from the literary tradition, literary vampires, like their folkloric counterparts, present a sort of shared social history that even modern societies crave. These histories, no matter how fictionalized, assure readers that a real history actually exists. As she explains, the undead teach us that are all trapped in the flow, or cycle, of history, tumbling along with others--dead and undead-whether we like it or not (48). In chapter 3, and Psychology: Body, Soul, and Self, Hallab argues that vampires have too often been reduced to a simple symbol of our unconscious sexual desires and fears (54). This reading, she claims, unnecessarily limits the vampire's appeal and ignores its broader, more universal function as a symbol of an immortal self. Vampires are defined by their undying sense of self. …

Kate Harts

As a parent of a teenage daughter and as a teacher of adolescents, I try to stay in touch with their entertainment world. I listen to their music, go to some of the “teen” movies, read adolescent novels, and watch television targeted to the teen audience. Two years ago, my daughter invited me to watch her favorite television program with her. Initially, I would simply enjoy sitting with her and sneaking in some conversation during the commercials. Since that time, I am surprised and a little embarrassed to discover that I frequently find myself sitting alone watching this program while my daughter busies herself with other activities. I'm hooked. That program is Buffy, The Vampire Slayer starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers. The series, which premiered on March 10, 1997, is a spin-off from the 1992 movie of the same name. Although the movie was not a box-office hit, it developed a loyal following of viewers who kept video rentals and sales active. The scriptwriter for the movie version of Buffy, Joss Whedon, also serves as creative executive—writer, producer, and director—for the television series (Genge). Although the show airs on the upstart network, WB, and is targeted at adolescents, it has received a significant amount of attention in entertainment and mainstream media. Buffy has been described as “the very best horror has to offer” (Genge xv); with “powerful] ludic elements [in] symbolism and language” (Wilcox 23); offering “transgressive possibilities for reimagining gendered relations and modernist American ideologies” (Owen 25) in “brainy, goodhearted, gloriously expressive TV poetry” (Carson 37) with “delightfully campy dialogue” (Genge xiv) centering around a slight, blonde, ex-cheerleader who “kicks vampire butt.” The framing narrative is about a young woman who inherited special skills as a vampire-slayer, and each episode sees her face assorted demonic forces challenging her and threatening humanity. The first three seasons were set in Sunnydale High School; the present season has moved to the campus of the college in the same town. Buffy has an assortment of friends and foes who are regulars or semi-regulars in the series. Her “Watcher” (or guardian) is Giles (played by Anthony Stewart Head) who has been charged with the duties of training and assisting the Slayer. Her best friend, Willow (played by Alyson Hannigan), displays exceptional computer skills and dabbles in witchcraft. Two other friends, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Oz (Seth Green), round out Buffy's inner circle who get entangled in demonic battles. Another character, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) has left the series to join Angel in a spin-off show. Cordelia plays a shallow, narcissistic young woman who epitomizes the homecoming queen popularity of traditionally mainstream adolescent experiences. The show has generated an active following. My daughter has bookmarked several web pages that serve as electronic equivalents of fan clubs. These pages include episode summaries, electronic bulletin boards, current news regarding future episodes, personal information about the stars and Joss Whedon, lyrics and artists of the music heard in the show, and links to other related sites. Several of the sites solicit and receive stories and songs written by viewers that stay true to the characters, plots, and themes of the show. Recently two sites ceased including transcripts and sound recordings from the shows after executives (and probably their legal affairs department) contacted them from 20th Century-Fox. Fans are being urged to write letters of protest. In addition to the web pages, there are several chat line sites where fans can engage in a conversation about the show. My daughter's email receives an average of eight to ten messages a week from the chat line to which she subscribes. In addition to the large adolescent following, clearly, something about this show has touched a chord in older viewers as well, witness the critical reviews cited above. The adult magazine George revealed Buffy as second in a list of “20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics.” To apply the term “postmodern” (or any other term) to contemporary society can be problematic. The complexity and vastness of our society defies simple one-word categorization. Postmodernism, as defined by M. H. Abrams extended the contratraditional movements in arts and literature of the modern age to the breaking point where modern works were deemed as conventional and “high art” was devalued in favor of popular art forms. Some postmodernist works celebrated the “'meaninglessness' of existence and the underlying 'void,' or 'nothingness' on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended” (120). Susan Bordo proposes various origins of the “postmodern age.” Some posit that the postmodern era developed as a reaction to the breakdown of the Enlightenment notions of humanism, rational thought, and beliefs in Truth and Objectivity. Some cite the failure of a cohesive hegemony of Western culture as the beginning of postmoderninity. Some discuss the “information explosion” as evidence of the new era. And some, including Bordo, point to the runaway consumer capitalism of our present culture as the most visible proof of a postmodern society. The term “postmodernism” is used in discussions about literature and the arts in much the same way “poststructuralism” frames conversations about linguistics and literary theory. Poststructuralists discuss meaning, or meaninglessness, by exposing “the naively representational theory of language” (Eagleton 124). Because we are all powerless over the universal influence of language, our agency or our free will is lessened; in a sense, we are de-centered within the circle of our experiences. These structures of language have presented society in terms of binary opposites, of opposing dualities. Poststructuralists reveal these oppositions within a text or any other cultural artifact and neutralize them by deconstructing the binary altogether. This process, outlined by Jacques Derrida, suggests that a deconstructive reader (or viewer) will look for evidence of grammatical or linguistic oppositions—rich/poor, strong/weak, right/left, man/woman—that conform to culturally accepted hierarchical relationships which privilege the first term (or signifier) in the duality while subordinating the second. After exposing the opposition, the hierarchy is inverted by privileging the second term resulting in a new vision of the relationship—poor/rich, weak/strong, left/right, and woman/man. The final step argues for the futility and meaninglessness of structuring binary oppositions in general by exposing them as ideological and cultural contexts that limit and marginalize us. The writers of Buffy play with discourse of cultural patterns in a way that deconstructs many of the dualities of contemporary society. A recent episode (November 23, 1999) is set on Thanksgiving, a cultural tradition rife with ideology. Buffy wants to re-enact a traditional Thanksgiving celebration with her “family of friends.” (Like many adolescent narratives, parents figure little in the action (Donelson and Nilsen). Buffy's father lives in another city and has only been seen in a few episodes. Her mother, Joyce (played by Kristine Sutherland), was oblivious to Buffy's secret slayer identity until the last episode of the second season.) Willow voices the cynical postmodern summation of the hypocrisy of celebrating the genocide of an indigenous culture. Nevertheless, Buffy convinces Willow, Xander, and Anya (played by Emma Caulfield)—Xander's demon girlfriend who grants spurned women retribution towards men—to come to a “real Thanksgiving dinner” at Giles' home. When Giles asks why the dinner has to be at his house, Buffy replies, “You're the patriarch; you have to toast the festivities or it's all meaningless.” Giles notes that it's more a matter of leaving him with the mess to which Buffy agrees. Later as the plot develops, avenging spirits of slaughtered native Americans begin to attack and kill. Willow is reluctant to help devise a plan to kill the spirits due to her nationalistic guilt. Into the mix enters another recurring character called Spike (played by James Marsters), although an enemy of Buffy's, he has come to her for help because he has been implanted (neutered) so that he can no longer “perform” as a vampire. He speaks with a British accent and adds commentary to the discussion about the avenging spirits. He scoffs at the guilt feelings expressed by Willow and speaks with the imperialistic voice of the “natural order” and “might makes right” in Western colonialism. Within this single episode, Buffy has offered ironic commentary and parody of cultural icons such as nationalistic holidays, patriarchal customs, masculine libido, and colonial expansionism. For poststructuralist feminists, the duality of male/female becomes the most troublesome and its inversion and subsequent neutralization is the object of a collective activity. Feminists seek means to subvert the patriarchal nature of Western society. 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