Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter…High School? Dante's Commedia and Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Abstract

Abstract The article studies Dante’s Commedia and its influence on American televisual culture. In addition to exploring how the poem has shaped the audience’s perception of the afterlife, it observes how the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) interweaves, appropriates, and adapts the medieval text into its series arc. Throughout its production, Buffy the Vampire Slayer received critical praise and recognition, including a 1999 Emmy Awards nomination and, in 2014, was included in Time magazine’s “100 Best TV Shows of All Time.” In addition, the series has amassed a place in academia, in part due to the publication of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. Although the program is worthy of further intellectual exploration, often it is snubbed because of its content and medium, television. Throughout its seven-year span, the show has appropriated Sophocles, Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm, T. S. Eliot, and E. M. Forster throughout each season’s main story arc. However, what is striking about the series is that it playfully hides one of its primary sources from view: Dante. The article explores how Dante’s adaptation and appropriation raise the show’s status of low, domestic culture to a higher level of art and transtextuality.