The Fan Fiction Studies Reader

Part 1. Fan Fiction as Literature

1 fan fiction as literature As noted in the introduction, the three essays in this section all address fan-created works as literary artifacts. Although the high-low culture divide continues to be challenged, with scholars now willing to seriously treat such formerly disdained texts as science fiction, comic books, video games, and pornography, fan-created texts have only rarely been the focus of analysis. As the following essays show, fan texts—and here we use fan fiction as an exemplar for all sorts of fan texts, which may include other forms of artwork, like fan-made videos—may be addressed in terms of the impetus of their creation, the medium of their transmission, and the modes of analysis used to study them. One subgenre of academic literary analysis is not included here: a close reading of a fan-written text. It may not be coincidental that the specter of authorial intention, cast out with the rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism, coincides with fan fiction’s beginnings. The interpretive power shifted away from the author and even the text. Instead, it resides in the process of reading and interpretation. 20 part 1 Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1977) and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (1977) theorized a literature in which meaning always exceeded the author’s intent; often meaning was coproduced between author and reader. In a way, fan fiction might be read as a fictional embodiment of this collaborative reading process, although it is also a creative text in its own right. From its inception, fan fiction has always been multiple: entertainment and analysis, original and derivative. Henry Jenkins, in Textual Poachers, introduces the world of media fans and the expansive worlds they create in their stories, particularly those who are both academics and fans—acafans. Using Michel de Certeau’s term poaching , Jenkins describes the active reading strategies of fans who “create” fan works by co-opting what belongs to someone else. He continues his discussion of the aesthetic and political implications of fan works by analyzing the numerous intertextual dimensions contained in any fan text—not just with the source text, but also with other TV shows or films featuring the actors, other literary texts, other fan-created texts, and specific cultural contexts. It is notable that Jenkins’s early work on fan fiction already features the complex intertextuality, the strong cultural component, and the complicated relationship with the media industry that suffuse later studies. The majority of fan fiction scholarship deals with film and television fandoms , but Roberta Pearson’s 1997 essay “It’s Always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace” focuses on literary fandom. In her discussion of Sherlock Holmes fans, she introduces the subject of the immense changes to fan fiction brought about by the early stages of the Internet. Like Jenkins’s essay, Pearson’s demonstrates which aspects of fan fiction fandom have remained relatively stable and which have been completely altered. In “The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture” (2007), Cornel Sandvoss focuses on similarities of approach within the field of fan studies rather than on differences of content. By harking back to several decades of media and cultural studies, Sandvoss suggests a “synthesis between cultural studies and literary theory” in order for the field of fan studies to escape the disciplinary criticism that has been leveled against it. The literary approach to fan fiction has always taken several routes, each addressed by one of the essays included here, and which we address in turn: (1) texts are read collectively, harking back to oral storytelling and folkloristic narratives; (2) texts are read as critical analyses of the source texts; and (3) Fan Fiction as Literature 21 texts are read as literary works in their own right. Central to our analysis is an understanding of an author-fan as embedded in a community of other fans, to whom she disseminates her work and with whom she continually engages. ReadingCollectively If we compare fan fiction to mythological and folkloric retellings, we can see how it functions as the cultural equivalent of collective storytelling. Fan fiction often retells the same events and scenes, but from different points of view, with myriad extensions and elaborations. Other versions of the same story may be just as important to the fan artwork as the primary source. Henry Jenkins (in Harmon 1997) argues that the...