Amateur mythographies: Fan fiction and the myth of myth (original) (raw)
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"Maska" 40 (4/2018) Origins - Beginnings - Genesis, 2018
Published: http://www.maska.psc.uj.edu.pl/documents/40768330/43096068/Maska\_40.pdf/3e9d48e0-e96c-44da-9538-d5c3053770b8 The aim of this article is to show fan writing as a practice that transforms a pop culture text into a myth using the example of Harry Potter phenomenon. According to Véronique Gély, a myth is made by the audience; it is a story that elicits strong emotional response, becoming a part of collective consciousness and inspires new creative work. Harry Potter became a myth because it is popular across the globe, it resonates with the audience, causing heated discussions and inspiring new art, a part of which is fan fiction, where the original story is retold, supplemented and modified to curate its readers’ needs.
Fan (Fiction) Acting on Media and the Politics of Appropriation
Media and Communication, 2017
Fanfiction is the creative appropriation and transformation of existing popular media texts by fans who take stories, worlds and/or characters as starting points and create their own stories based on them. As a cultural field of practice, fanfiction questions prevalent concepts of individual authorship and proprietary of cultural goods. At the same time, fanfiction itself is challenged. Through processes of mediatization, fanfiction grew and became increasingly visible. Third parties, ranging from the media industry (e.g., film studios) and copyright holders to journalism and academia, are interested in fanfiction and are following its development. We regard fanfiction communities and fan acting as fields for experimentation and as discursive arenas which can help understand what appropriating, writing and publishing in a digital culture and the future of writing might look like. In this paper, we outline important debates on the legitimacy and nature of fanfiction and present preli...
Fanfics and Identities: What do our Fan Stories Unveil? (MONOGRAPH - NOT REVISED)
2016
Amorim, Aline dos Santos; Moura, SML. (Advisor). ‘Fanfics and Identities: What do our Fan Stories unveil?’. Rio de Janeiro, 2016, p. Monograph – Departamento de Letras, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. This monograph was shaped with the objective of understanding how identities arise from fan fictions produced by high school students from a public institution in Rio de Janeiro, Colégio Estadual Compositor Luiz Carlos da Vila, after introducing the genre at school as a Pop, creative and personal resource to stimulate English learning. Sections include theory background on Applied Linguistics, Reflective Teaching, Fan Fiction and Identity; methodology include the collection of interviews after the presentations of eleven outstanding stories based on Universal Studios’ Jurassic World, collected throughout the months of November and December of 2015, respectively. Fan fiction writers try to portray characters’ identities, but they can also portray personal experiences in stories, borrowing elements from their own lives. This dialogic phenomenon is present in all the analyzed stories, and it may be noticed in other texts related to the genre. Key words: Applied linguistics, creative writing, fan fiction, identities, pop culture.
Authorizing Authorship: Fan Writers and Resistance to Public Reading
Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary critique and history. This intellectual lacuna exists primarily because of the dual problems of genre and gender; much of what we will consider as fan writing and fan fiction in this essay originates from science fiction and fantasy media properties from the 1960s onwards, and much of it is written by women, especially young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.
Fan fiction and fairy tales share some enemies. As the practice of writing new stories using public figures or previously published fictional characters, situations, and settings, fan fiction is often derided as hopelessly derivative. Fairy-tale history likewise traces promiscuous networks of retellings, across media forms, voiced by multiple, often unnamed authors and storytellers. For many academic and popular commentators, such conditions of anonymity, pseudonymity, and repetition mark both fan fiction and fairy tales as low culture with little artistic or political potential. That fan fiction is authored almost exclusively by women, and fairy tales often become gendered in their association with the home, childrearing, kinship, and romance, only appear to further consign both to frivolousness and obscurity (). Yet, while some theoretical traditions view repetition as a sign of stultifying cultural deadening associated with capitalist culture industries, others view it as the space of potential agency and critique. The ubiquity of fairy-tale themes and narratives throughout Western storytelling and popular culture make such stories profitable, but also powerful, as part of a shared pre-capitalist language that remains available for appropriation and retelling by anyone. On the one hand, it is a language of cultural reproduction in which brands and commodities are enunciated, reproducing economic, patriarchal, heteronormative, and racial hierarchies. However, feminist critics, academics, and fans can also enunciate fairy-tale language as an open and widely recognizable system of resonant signs, widely understood and easily circulated for critiques of the modern world. For example, because the fairy tale deals so often with coming of age and courtship, it offers fertile ground to feminist, queer, and trans appropriation. Thus, fan fiction that borrows fairy tale themes, specifically fairy-tale alternate universes (AUs), occupies a complex crossroads between mass and folk culture and can offer a shared language wherein anyone can negotiate, discuss, and critique modern culture. Repetition in Folk Culture, Fan Culture, and Shared Culture Although each is steeped in repetition, fan fiction's prominent connection with popular culture and mass media creates potential political tensions with fairy tales. Investigating these relationships also connects to a longstanding conversation in which fairy tales have historically been a testing ground for questions swirling around the discipline of folklore about the relationship between oral, literary, and media forms, the nature of the folk, and the meaning of authenticity (Darnton 2009 ; Foster and Tolbert 2015). In much of Western culture repetition obscures the origins of folk narratives, which then become common property. As such, they need not be explicitly marked like recursive literary texts. Indeed, the Romantic conception of art and folklore is in direct opposition; folk narratives' value resides precisely in their lack
The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, 2017
This entry presents an overview of the development and current state of fan studies, exploring the "reverse image" of media effects. The field of fan studies offers the ultimate rebuttal of the traditional media effects-model, by stressing the independence, agency and power of media consumers vis-à-vis media producers. After providing a short historiography of the discipline, this entry dives deeper into three themes that have been central to discussions within fan studies since its early beginnings: fan fiction, fan communities, and places of fandom.