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Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe: Lancaster applies performance theory to the expanded universe of B5, including the official roleplaying game, the Babylon 5 Wars table wargame, the collectible card game, the official CD-ROM guide, and fan fiction. Unfortunately, his analysis is not very deep – it basically reduces to “performance theory can describe what goes on in these fan behaviors.” But I was willing to believe that from the beginning. I wanted to know what that means, and I didn’t get it – other than that Lancaster thinks sf fandom is about wanting to go into space mentally because physical travel is impossible for most of us.
Reading Stargate SG-1, Stan Beeler & Lisa Dickson eds.: SG1 doesn’t get as much academic attention as many other fan/cult favorites, which may have something to do with aca-fans’ ideas of taste, as recently discussed at the Flow conference. This book is a partly successful attempt to change that. The first section, which analyzes the episodes themselves, begins with an excellent if dryly written analysis of Heroes, parts 1 & 2, which dissects camera angles and ideologies of individual heroism with equal skill. The rest of the articles in the section are not much more than discussions of what the authors like about SG1 (its pop culture references, its tension between knowledge and the dangers of knowledge, Sam). The second half is a little better, beginning with two essays – one quite good, the other okay – about the relationship between SG1’s Canadian production and its contents and global distribution. The essay discussing the economics of series production and worldwide syndication is also worth reading. Unfortunately, the fan-centered chapters, one on roleplaying games and one on Sam-oriented fan fiction, are drab and lacking insight.
Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: Drawing on psychoanalytic and performance theory, Sandvoss analyzes fans and their relationships with mass media texts. One significant move he makes is to consider non-textually productive/non-organized fans as just as important in his analysis as the more visible and more cordoned-off groups on which most fan scholarship has focused. He posits fannish narcissism – finding in texts what we want to see, using them as a means to self-knowledge – as a partial response to the negative image of fan pathology, because narcissism is a more neutral term in this work than it usually is. While the work sounds some important cautionary notes about seeing fandom, especially organized fandom, as a harbinger of some broader social or personal change, I was disturbed by his refusal to complicate the binary division “some art challenges and changes us, other art reassures us,” and his judgment that fandom is a place where we only find what we brought with us all along. Sandvoss rejects the high art/low art division, only to remake it in the form of “learn about things that are not-us”/“learn about ourselves by thinking about texts.” Certainly, as Matt Hills has written, the reasons we fixate on certain fan texts and not others always remain a little mysterious, and we feel personal connections, but in Sandvoss’s account what becomes mysterious is how we change and negotiate our identities in response to our encounters with the external world, including media texts.
Reading Stargate SG-1, Stan Beeler & Lisa Dickson eds.: SG1 doesn’t get as much academic attention as many other fan/cult favorites, which may have something to do with aca-fans’ ideas of taste, as recently discussed at the Flow conference. This book is a partly successful attempt to change that. The first section, which analyzes the episodes themselves, begins with an excellent if dryly written analysis of Heroes, parts 1 & 2, which dissects camera angles and ideologies of individual heroism with equal skill. The rest of the articles in the section are not much more than discussions of what the authors like about SG1 (its pop culture references, its tension between knowledge and the dangers of knowledge, Sam). The second half is a little better, beginning with two essays – one quite good, the other okay – about the relationship between SG1’s Canadian production and its contents and global distribution. The essay discussing the economics of series production and worldwide syndication is also worth reading. Unfortunately, the fan-centered chapters, one on roleplaying games and one on Sam-oriented fan fiction, are drab and lacking insight.
Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: Drawing on psychoanalytic and performance theory, Sandvoss analyzes fans and their relationships with mass media texts. One significant move he makes is to consider non-textually productive/non-organized fans as just as important in his analysis as the more visible and more cordoned-off groups on which most fan scholarship has focused. He posits fannish narcissism – finding in texts what we want to see, using them as a means to self-knowledge – as a partial response to the negative image of fan pathology, because narcissism is a more neutral term in this work than it usually is. While the work sounds some important cautionary notes about seeing fandom, especially organized fandom, as a harbinger of some broader social or personal change, I was disturbed by his refusal to complicate the binary division “some art challenges and changes us, other art reassures us,” and his judgment that fandom is a place where we only find what we brought with us all along. Sandvoss rejects the high art/low art division, only to remake it in the form of “learn about things that are not-us”/“learn about ourselves by thinking about texts.” Certainly, as Matt Hills has written, the reasons we fixate on certain fan texts and not others always remain a little mysterious, and we feel personal connections, but in Sandvoss’s account what becomes mysterious is how we change and negotiate our identities in response to our encounters with the external world, including media texts.
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