"Fanfic as Critical Commentary"
Oct. 28th, 2009 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrixrefugeeFound this linked in a comment on the discussion I posted (read "ranted") about last night/earlier this morning: it's from the blog of a professor at MIT who is himself a fanguy. I want to hug this guy: here is a serious, articulate academic who's serious about pop culture, but doesn't take it seriously, unlike a lot of the elitists among the academia who forget that today's classics were once yesterday's pop culture: "Madame Bovary" was once what "Desperate Housewives" is today.
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/fan_fiction_as_critical_commen.html
I'm swooning over this passage in particular, in which he compares fanfic with critical essays. My argument has always been, "If Fair Use can apply to authors of critical essays, why not apply it to fanfic?" The arguments of some critical essays can be as eye-opening or as "did we read the same story??"-inducing as some fanfics.
Fan stories are in no simple sense just "extensions" or "continuations" or "extra episodes" of the original series. Unlike the model critical essays discussed by the various university writing centers, the insights about the work get expressed not through nonfictional argumentation but rather through the construction of new stories. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. That said, it is not hard to find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue to support its particular interpretation of the character's motives and actions. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig particular deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but the last time I looked, fair use gets defined in functional terms (what is the writer trying to do) and not aesthetic terms (what they produce is good or bad artistically). Fan fiction extrapolates more broadly beyond what is explicitly stated in the text than do most conventional critical essays and may include the active appropriation and transformation of the characters as presented but even here, I would argue that the point of situating the characters in a different historical context, say, or in another genre is to show what makes these characters tick and how they might well remain the same (or be radically different) if they operated in another time and place. Fan fiction is speculative but that does not mean that it is not at its core interpretative.
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/fan_fiction_as_critical_commen.html
I'm swooning over this passage in particular, in which he compares fanfic with critical essays. My argument has always been, "If Fair Use can apply to authors of critical essays, why not apply it to fanfic?" The arguments of some critical essays can be as eye-opening or as "did we read the same story??"-inducing as some fanfics.
Fan stories are in no simple sense just "extensions" or "continuations" or "extra episodes" of the original series. Unlike the model critical essays discussed by the various university writing centers, the insights about the work get expressed not through nonfictional argumentation but rather through the construction of new stories. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. That said, it is not hard to find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue to support its particular interpretation of the character's motives and actions. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig particular deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but the last time I looked, fair use gets defined in functional terms (what is the writer trying to do) and not aesthetic terms (what they produce is good or bad artistically). Fan fiction extrapolates more broadly beyond what is explicitly stated in the text than do most conventional critical essays and may include the active appropriation and transformation of the characters as presented but even here, I would argue that the point of situating the characters in a different historical context, say, or in another genre is to show what makes these characters tick and how they might well remain the same (or be radically different) if they operated in another time and place. Fan fiction is speculative but that does not mean that it is not at its core interpretative.