Artifact Reviews, etc.

So the assignment for this week was to complete a "review" of our cultural artifact - in my case, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Overall, it wasn't a difficult assignment for me, as I had already expressed the majority of my Twilight-related opinions in the first post of this blog. I did a brief amount of research about the context of the novel's release (I was not, unfortunately, cool enough to know about Twilight the second it was published, although I do have a first edition) then re-worded my opinions about the novel, and figured I was done. I wasn't, of course. The hard part of this assignment came when, upon reviewing the rubric, I remembered I needed to include a discussion of the issues surrounding the novel. I realized that, while I had a vague understanding of the most common criticisms of Twilight, I had no idea how deep those criticisms ran. Faced with a lack of information and a hundred different questions, I did what most people my age do: I got on the Internet.

Type the words "Twilight novel" into a Google search page, and the results are astounding. Nearly 12 MILLION results are available; unfortunately, while the majority are extremely entertaining, very few of them are what could be considered "academic". From fan pages to Wikipedia, information abounds, but not in trolling through the Google results, only a select handful of sites were actually useful.

One thing I never anticipated about this project was how difficult it would be to find scholarly opinions on a novel that was released only four years ago. This is definitely going to be one of the most difficult parts of the assignment. While the Twilight Phenomenon is a huge part of modern pop culture, it is an undeniably young part, and very little research has been done. In order for this project to be successful, I am going to have to think outside of the box, and base my research on the connections I can make between the present and the past. So far, those connections include:

• the similiarities/differences between the current Twilight obsession, and past pop-culture fads (Beatlemania, Elvis, etc.)
• any relevant similarities between the Edward/Bella relationship, and the romances Meyers references in Twilight (Heathcliffe/Catherine, Romeo/Juliet, Elizabeth/Mr. Darcy)
• the vast differences between the vampires of Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, any other relevant pop culture vampires, and the vampires of Twilight

This project is not going to be anywhere as easy as I thought. And, surprisingly, I'm okay with that.