Always Late to the Party

So, in my travels across the online zombieverse, I recently came across the pretty hilarious video below while browsing The Zed Word Zombie Blog and it reminded me of a question I've been worrying around for quite some time. But first, enjoy a Bad Lip Reading of AMC's The Walking Dead (from the folks over at BLR).

So much genius and hilarity and amazingness in such a short video. But I don’t really want to talk about the clip. We can get into what makes zombies so open to parody and the weird dynamic between horror and comedy when I talk about Evil Dead: The Musical tomorrow. What I’m more interested in right now is the fact that this clip was first published a year and a half ago (!). I thoroughly enjoy Bad Lip Reading, I clearly have a borderline unhealthy fascination with zombies, and I’m a big fan of The Walking Dead, and yet, somehow, this little clip of wonderful didn’t make it across my path until late last night. Now, I can explain that away fairly easily by pointing out my almost complete lack of a presence on social media (I miss out on some viral stuff) and a general avoidance of Youtube as a recovering addict (one click leads to… all the clicks). That’s easy. What I find less easy to account for, however, and thus more interesting to consider, is the similar belatedness that seems to define literary studies. Even within a cultural studies approach, in which the field of inquiry is opened to regard nearly everything a culture produces as a readable, interpretable texts, there seems to be an overall inability to engage the new. But is it an inability or an unwillingness?

While there is no question that zombies are finally getting the critical attention they deserve, and I don’t think it can quite be said that the zombie wave has crested (it’s close, but not quite there yet), I can’t help but feel that academia might have shambled up to the farmhouse a little late on this. Not too late, by any means, but late enough to matter. This sweet new blog, for example. I’ve always been interested in the progression of academically sanctioned forms of

This is what the "academic establishment"
looks like in my brain

“literature,” and wanted to use this platform to explore that issue a bit. Take novels: initially, they were very much frowned upon by the academic establishment, deemed low entertainment for idle minds. Eventually, though, novels gained such widespread acceptance, even prominence, that they now dominate the (mostly theoretical) Western canon. There was a similar trajectory for film, though it has yet to quite attain the novel’s revered status, and television (the best of it) and comic books (call them graphic novels, if you want to; they’re comic books, and that’s okay) are not far behind. My assumption, is that video games too will one day make this leap. No matter how much they kick and scream about it, sooner or later, serious scholars will have to acknowledge that video games are an increasingly important aspect of how our culture tells itself stories. And then, sometime in the future, after video games start having their choice-driven, non-linear, narrative structures analyzed and parsed in college classrooms, maybe, blogs might start being treated as though they have lasting cultural and artistic merit. Of course, maybe I’m wrong and someone like Gregory Cowles is correct when he says that even the best blogs are “too topical and too fleeting to count as literature.” 

I mean, I'm not wrong. But maybe... 

Nah, blogs will be literature one day. The same way the Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals are considered literature now (they sound kind of bloggish to me). Though, to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that all blogs have artistic merit. Or all TV shows, comic books, films, or novels either, for that matter. There’s quite a lot of rubbish out there. But that’s always been true. We don’t read or teach every shitty sonnet that was written at the turn of the 17^th century; we focus on Shakepeare and Spenser, because they wrote the good ones.

I’m not so much worried about whether or not the academy will start paying critical attention to blogs and video games. It’ll happen. It has to. But to return to my original point (kinda), why do we, as a discipline, have to wait? As I’ve been looking for interesting zombie blogs to explore and/or analyze as part of my own project, I’ve noticed that many, though not all, of the most intriguing zombie blogs are no longer being maintained. I can still read their posts, of course, and provide commentary on them, but I’ve missed the opportunity to observe them and interact with them while they were active. Which is comforting in a way, because it's what I'm used to. But it's also a lot less fun, don't you think? Is there something about literary studies that makes it tend more towards archaeology than anthropology? Why are we so much more interested in poking the skeletal remains than the dynamic body? Thoughts?

But I Don't Want to Be a Zombie!

Hey, let’s all pretend to be our own worst nightmare!

Ummm. No.

Can’t I just pretend I didn’t get eaten and die and come back, instead?

Perhaps one of the most persistently fascinating manifestations of the zombie’s overwhelming popularity and ascension to its undisputed position as the monster of the 21^st century, people everywhere gleefully gather dressed and made-up as undead corpses. And I mean everywhere. 

 

There are zombie proms

Zombie baseball games

Zombie pub crawls

Indeed, nearly every major city in North America has a zombie walk of some kind and most have become annual events (really, it’s more of a global phenomenon: London, Paris, Moscow, Recife, and Santiago all stage their own annual events as well). While these events are often held to raise money for charity or to try for world records, or even just to boost ticket sales, the explanation for the number of people that show up to these events year after year to shamble and moan with each other is simple: people enjoy pretending to be zombies. The more interesting (and difficult) question, however, is “Why?” What is it about this particular monster, and this particular time, that has allowed the zombie to transcend Halloween and the isolated cult followings typically enjoyed by most horror figures to achieve such cultural ubiquity?

Hello, my name is Emmanuel Abreu, and I am a Master’s candidate in English at SUNY Buffalo State. This blog is the focus of an independent study that I am conducting as part of my degree program and is one component of a three part attempt to make sense of all this zombie madness (that’s right: Buff State lets you study zombies and still takes you seriously). Although the other two parts will not, for the most part, intersect with this blog, I would still like to mention them briefly.

My Master’s thesis, “‘They’re Us, That’s All’: Zombies and the Horror of Familiarity,” explores the role of horror and “monsters” in shaping any culture’s understanding of itself by looking specifically at the development of the zombie figure over the years before focusing on zombie literature and film from the first decade of the 21^st century. Ultimately, my thesis argues that what is most frightening about the zombie is not how different it is from us, but how similar.

In addition to my thesis, I am also co-teaching a senior seminar course at Buff State with my thesis adviser, Dr. Lorna Perez, as part of a Master’s project. The subject? Zombie fictions (predictable?). The course is designed to investigate how zombie narratives function to reflect and respond to various societal concerns and cultural anxieties. Working from the cultural studies model, we will be reading various zombie “texts,” including novels, short stories, and films, and discussing what they have to say about the culture that created them. My output for the project, however, will be a conference paper that considers various approaches to integrating film and alternative media into a literature classroom: not just to supplement texts, but as texts themselves.

Which brings me back to this here zombie blog. This blog is dedicated to everything that my project and thesis do not address. Everything that falls through the cracks. Because that’s where the meat is! TV shows, graphic novels and comic books, mass zombie gatherings, and ad campaigns. I also want to pay particularly close attention to the pervasive presence of zombies on the internet. So much of our engagement with the zombie figure finds its outlet online - in blogs and social media, on message boards and other online communities, or with self-made Youtube movies  and crowd-sourced fiction like Dead Inside: Do Not Enter (a brilliant little epistolary “novel” created by Lost Zombies, a Bay area social network). By and large, though, these “texts” are ignored, both critically and in the classroom. This blog is my attempt to bridge that gap, to explore these works and interact with these communities where they reside. Sometimes serious. Sometimes silly. All zombies, all the time. Hopefully you enjoy the ride.