In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies, and Sherlockians Roberta Pearson Let’s begin with a quiz.1 Which of the appellations in this chapter’s title would fans/buffs/enthusiasts/devotees/aficionados/cognoscenti/connoisseurs of J. S. Bach, William Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek accept, and which not? Adherents of the popular and the middle-brow have nicknames. North American devotees of the great detective call themselves “Sherlockians”; the British prefer the more formal but less euphonious “Holmesians.” Some Star Trek fans accept the “Trekkie” nomenclature; others see it as derogatory and opt for the more serious “Trekkers.” Adherents of high culture don’t have nicknames.2 “Bachies” is my coinage and “Bardies” Henry Jenkins’s (for which I thank him); they are not in common currency but perhaps should be. My (entirely unproven) assumption is that Bach and Shakespeare fans would reject the semi-derisory nicknames; I suspect (again with no evidence, but that’s the nature of this chapter) that most would also reject the term “fan” and opt for another of the labels under offer. Both the specific playful diminutives and the general label of “fan” extend popular culture practices to the rarefied realms of baroque music and Elizabethan drama, a leveling that those with allegiances to the supposedly higher realms of “serious” music and literature might resent. The absence of a single agreed-upon name signals the invisibility in which power often cloaks itself. Those involved in popular or middle-brow culture are generally seen as fans or, more specifically , Trekkies, Whovians, Sherlockians, or Wodehousians and the like; their firm categorization is a social judgment, sometimes a negative one. The adherents of high culture are similarly categorized, but the multiplication of labels avoids negative connotation. The terms “buffs”/“enthusiasts”/ “devotees” are at worst neutral, while “aficionados”/“cognoscenti”/ 98 “connoisseurs,” with their implications of specialized, and more importantly , worthwhile knowledge, positively value those to whom they are applied. The differences in labels and their associated valuations gives rise to several questions. Which labels would people choose to apply to themselves and why? Do the words “fans”/”enthusiasts”/”devotees”/”aficionados ”/”cognoscenti”/”connoisseurs” signal different degrees and kinds of engagements with the beloved object? What’s the difference between those who engage with “serious” music and those who engage with “serious” literature ? What’s the difference between adherents of Shakespeare, a writer acclaimed as the greatest playwright of all time and serving as a bastion of British national identity, and those of Conan Doyle, a second-rank writer who did what he did very well and whose output some might classify as fiction rather than literature? How different are the high-culture Bachies and Bardies from the middle-brow Sherlockians from the vast popular culture fandoms (e.g. Trekkies) in their appropriations/pleasures and their social organizations? Or should we perhaps be seeking similarity rather than difference? As John Frow argues, “There is no longer a stable hierarchy of value running from ‘low’ to ‘high’ culture, and ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture can no longer be neatly correlated with a hierarchy of social classes” (1995: 1). Frow’s cautionary quotation marks signal contemporary scholars ’ uneasiness not only with correlating a hierarchy of value with social class but also with having to designate the steps of that hierarchy by distinct terms such as “high-”, “low-”, and “middle-brow.” The relationship among cultural values bears greater resemblance to an Escher print than a real stairway, but in an article of this length, I can do no more than acknowledge the problem, admitting that my personal aesthetic judgments drive the distinctions. The reader should insert her own scare quotes or reflect upon her own aesthetic criteria as necessary. The larger point here is that while fan studies has extensively engaged with the popular and even occasionally with the middle-brow (see Brooker 2005a), it has almost entirely refused to engage with the high. The study of high culture still undeniably thrives in the academy; Shakespeare is far from taking up residence on the dust heap of history. But within the strain of cultural studies that traces its lineage to Birmingham, high culture figures only as a repressive other against which to celebrate the virtues of the popular. When challenged, the implicit preference among cultural studies scholars for popular culture can become aggressively explicit. Some of my (mostly younger) colleagues are suspicious of my wanting to Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies...

Share