BOOKS, Reading "Six Feet Under," Kim Akass & Janet McCabe, eds. (2005)

I think it's terrific when TV and pop culture are taken seriously as a form of literature, and subjected to the same kinds of analysis that novels are. And the essays in this book certainly do that, treating Six Feet Under with immense respect as a significant work of television.

But oh my lord, the academic jargon is dense here; these authors have been professors for so long that they're no longer capable of speaking comprehensible English. An example, chosen by opening the book to a random page:

Russell's queer identity emerges precisely through his refusal to claim an identity with an essence. The illegibility of his sexuality produces a queer positionality, and his rejection of his only heteronormative options constitute his resistance to heteronormativity.

Or this:

Six Feet Under's complicance with and departure from television conventions reveals to me how female subjectivity emerges as fluid, unstable and contingent precisely because it is represented in aesthetic and narrative forms that say it is. In the liminal spaces of the series -- its themes of death, its playing with conventions, introducing a character like Claire in the process of becoming -- might we see the television discourse preparing for another kind of subjectivity, another discourse?

It's as if it's been badly translated from some alien language. Not worth slogging through unless you're an obsessively devoted fan of the show.