@Ben Miller: Unfortunately, Dr. Buchanan has now passed away. I do what I can to keep his kind of scholarship going, however.

@Longasc: I think what it is with academics about Whedon is that it's not only fun, but there's a lot of hidden meaning and depth to his writing that's not found in a lot of contemporary fluff. If I had to take two "hack" writers from this century and say they'll be anthologized 200 years from now, it's Whedon and Stephen King.

@Jane: I've thought about that, but my main concern is the serialization of LOST. I'm even wary of "Welcome to the Hellmouth" as a To Be Continued and its effect on students understanding it in isolation. As exquisite (and what a perfect word that is for LOST writing) as Pilot 2 is, I worry about the length of an assignment based around 2 episodes as well as the continuation into the rest of the series.

It's really something I'll take in mind as I get more acclimated to teaching comp.

For the advanced classes, why not give something else a shot? I can only imagine how much those budding writers' creative juices would flow with the Pilot episode of Lost on the syllabus. Now *that* would make for some interesting writing assignments!

The writing of Pilot 2, however, is really something to behold. Every single one of those scenes – there's about thirty of them – has something wonderful inside. The same sort of wonderful, which is also same sort of wonderful in Pilot 1, but differently handled. More importantly for a writing class, examining the *transcript* of Pilot 2 can really expose some valuable writing techniques, which are also mirrored in the details of the shot composition of the episode. The writing is exquisite.

I'm reading another Dark Tower novel at the moment and I can really appreciate Stephen King's skill and story crafting. He's a good writer and it shows.

What is it with academics/professors that they ALL seem to love BUFFY and Joss Whedon's series in particular? Okay, not all of them. But 99% of the cool ones seem to be Buffy fans!

We had a Buffy course, but in medieval studies, not literature. Talk about serialized art/literature and compare them to courtly novels and all that. Comparing the slaughter in Kill Bill to the Nibelungenlied also sounded crazy, but suprisingly it was not.