Anne Jamison (with others), Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking over the World: There’s a lot of good stuff in here, as well as (and overlapping with) a fair amount what is probably comfort food for fans immersed in media fandom but might be hard to grok for nonfans, like reading literary criticism of a genre you don’t read in. And I’m okay with the latter as well as the former! Jamison puts gender front and center, but not exclusively--the other key ingredient is freedom. (Jamison disclaims expertise as to the relevant legal questions; this is freedom in practice.)
There’s a lot of material on Twilight and perspectives on commercialization of the E.L. James sort (commercialization of the zines/fanart sort isn’t really discussed). Her discussion of “marketing” fic within Twilight communities—where the rewards were nonmonetary, at least for many/initially—was eye-opening. I had no idea that fans of particular authors developed relatively formal marketing hierarchies to promote the author to others. The neatest insight, though, is that the debate over commercialization/pull-to-publish has a fascinating relationship with the actual content of Fifty Shades: fannish norms may form an unwritten contract—but, like the contract between Christian and Anastasia, it’s unsigned, and that makes all the difference for its enforceability. At least for the fans.
Interviews with writers and short pieces from other people, varying in quality, round out the volume, adding among other things more explicit attention to issues of race and nationality. Kristina Busse summarizes the rise of a/b/o tropes; as I thought about it, I wondered whether one driver of the trend is also what drives demand for historical romances: in contemporary settings, it’s harder and harder to think of dramatic reasons that people can’t be together. Regency social mores, or a/b/o societies, can provide the necessary answer to “if they love each other, why don’t they just get together?” Clearly there are other drivers, many also related to social changes/the desire to explore a differently configured set of stereotypes than current gender and race stereotypes. Separately, I loved the point one interviewee made that she had more freedom in writing romance in fic than she did in the commercial romance genre: though her fic readers expected the pair they loved to get together, she had more choices along the way without genre expectations—in commercial romance, she “might have to limit secondary characters … or stick to monogamous relationships even if they’re not committed.”
Darren Wershler says neat stuff about conceptual writing in contrast to fic. He calls conceptual writing fannish in that it was inspired by events in the art world more than by literary writers. Conceptual art features “a deemphasizing of the importance of the artist’s technical skill and the cohesiveness of the final product; an increasing emphasis on the importance of text over images; a shift away from the aesthetically pleasing toward the conveyance of that odd modern invention we call information; and a questioning of how art is ‘supposed’ to be framed, and the notion that there is a ‘correct’ context (like a gallery) in which people are supposed to encounter it.” Conceptual writing looks at the “dark matter” of literature—weather reports, legal transcripts, social media feeds, stock quotes, etc.: “they make up the bulk of everything that’s written, but we habitually pretend that they don’t matter in any capacity other than the moment.” It reframes these texts to defamiliarize them and draw attention to their odd features.
Conceptual writing has now gained art world legitimacy, and Wershler says that what interests him “is what happens next: how a community based around a formerly marginal writing practice deals with its own relative success,” as with fanfiction after Fifty Shades. The similarities between the two genres, he suggests, are obscured by cultural policing. Both grow out of particular kinds of interpretive communities where people mostly felt comfortable with the other people in their community/subcommunity. But: “Conceptual writing is located within literature and is ambivalent about wanting out. Fanfiction is located without literature and is ambivalent about wanting in.” And while both forms involve repetition with a difference, fanfiction, he argues, is about moving characters to different settings, while conceptual writing is about moving text to different contexts—“for example, by shifting the context of a text’s publication from official courtroom transcripts to a hardbound edition published by a literary small press.” (“Characters read” versions of Harry Potter in which a fan author interlineates characters’ reactions with extensive quotes from Rowling’s books might challenge this divide, but it’s no surprise that they’re controversial.) Creativity comes from copying, which means that, while both genres “might appear to challenge or threaten originality, they also rely on it and reproduce it at other moments”—you can’t have creativity without appropriation, and vice versa.
I adore (though don’t fully agree with) Wershler’s conclusion that conceptual writing might be able to do what poetry hasn’t:
Jonathan Lethem ends the volume on a high note. Building on his great Harper’s piece The Ecstasy of Influence, he argues for disaggregating concepts of transformation, transparency about appropriation, and morality. He provocatively argues that literary culture reacts differently to appropriation than visual etc. arts because literary criticism is too dependent on newspaper journalism. “[W]hereas other fields of art reception are successfully partitioned from ethos of journalists, book reviewers are usually newspapermen who fancy themselves book reviewers. The field of book reviewing so totally overwhelms academic literary criticism in terms of influence, and journalists are of course obsessed with journalistic notions of plagiarism, sources, and inaccuracy. These standards migrate far too much in the realm of literary writing.” Discussing the inevitable dependence of characters on bits borrowed from real people and other characters, he chides: “The dream that this complexity could be neatly sorted out is a very typical American, pragmatist, anti-intellectual fantasy, based on suspicion of the artist or intellectual.” And his description of overreaching intellectual property rights is fantastic. He makes his living in part from copyright, but “It’s like there’s ten miles of frosting on a cake. I like the cake, I might cling to the cake, but it definitely doesn’t need all that frosting.” (I'm reminded of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cesperanza's point that fanworks are all about having your cake and eating it too. That's the point of fanworks--infinite plenitude! Just maybe not so much frosting.
[F]ic provides a venue for all kinds of writers who are shut out from official culture, whether by demographic or skill or taste. It makes sense, however, that those who are less shut out from established systems of economic and cultural credit and prestige turn less often to a cultural form that has been not only unpaid, but actively stigmatized. I know many men who write fic, but I know even more men who write fic-like stories, in fic-like ways. When they do it, though, they sell it, get written up in the Times, call it postmodernism or pastiche or simply fiction. My study of fic communities has underscored how gender imbalance in literary and mass cultural production doesn’t just affect venue, opportunity, and reception for active writers; it affects people even wanting to try. It affects people even claiming to be trying. Fanfiction has given many writers permission and encouragement to do something they’d never imagined they could do—in part because they can do it in private, without seeming to arrogantly lay claim to the culturally valued and vaunted status of “writer.”I really liked her discussion of what’s conventionally considered the avant-garde v. fic: fanfiction is driven by experimentation and freedom, and yet it’s not experimental/avant-garde in the literary sense:
Literary avant-gardes tend to attract and be discovered by those who already evince a marked distaste for both the literary and commercial entertainment status quo. Fanwriting communities enjoy and consume commercial culture voraciously, celebrate it, even as they challenge and transform its products for their own sometimes radical purposes. Experimental writing in fanfiction is found and enjoyed by people who share at least one popular taste, a taste that has been catered to by mass culture. Many of these readers, however, also have tastes mass culture does not satisfy, tastes they may first discover by reading fic…. Yet fanfiction is largely driven by a love of the very elements—narrative and character—that much experimental writing of the past half-century has targeted for disruption and critique.Jamison also contrasts fic, and its awkward relationship to commerciality, with other forms—like poetry, which she points out is these days usually produced on a non-remunerative basis, where reputation is mostly what a poet can hope to achieve and outsiders tend to make fun of them as unproductive.
There’s a lot of material on Twilight and perspectives on commercialization of the E.L. James sort (commercialization of the zines/fanart sort isn’t really discussed). Her discussion of “marketing” fic within Twilight communities—where the rewards were nonmonetary, at least for many/initially—was eye-opening. I had no idea that fans of particular authors developed relatively formal marketing hierarchies to promote the author to others. The neatest insight, though, is that the debate over commercialization/pull-to-publish has a fascinating relationship with the actual content of Fifty Shades: fannish norms may form an unwritten contract—but, like the contract between Christian and Anastasia, it’s unsigned, and that makes all the difference for its enforceability. At least for the fans.
Interviews with writers and short pieces from other people, varying in quality, round out the volume, adding among other things more explicit attention to issues of race and nationality. Kristina Busse summarizes the rise of a/b/o tropes; as I thought about it, I wondered whether one driver of the trend is also what drives demand for historical romances: in contemporary settings, it’s harder and harder to think of dramatic reasons that people can’t be together. Regency social mores, or a/b/o societies, can provide the necessary answer to “if they love each other, why don’t they just get together?” Clearly there are other drivers, many also related to social changes/the desire to explore a differently configured set of stereotypes than current gender and race stereotypes. Separately, I loved the point one interviewee made that she had more freedom in writing romance in fic than she did in the commercial romance genre: though her fic readers expected the pair they loved to get together, she had more choices along the way without genre expectations—in commercial romance, she “might have to limit secondary characters … or stick to monogamous relationships even if they’re not committed.”
Darren Wershler says neat stuff about conceptual writing in contrast to fic. He calls conceptual writing fannish in that it was inspired by events in the art world more than by literary writers. Conceptual art features “a deemphasizing of the importance of the artist’s technical skill and the cohesiveness of the final product; an increasing emphasis on the importance of text over images; a shift away from the aesthetically pleasing toward the conveyance of that odd modern invention we call information; and a questioning of how art is ‘supposed’ to be framed, and the notion that there is a ‘correct’ context (like a gallery) in which people are supposed to encounter it.” Conceptual writing looks at the “dark matter” of literature—weather reports, legal transcripts, social media feeds, stock quotes, etc.: “they make up the bulk of everything that’s written, but we habitually pretend that they don’t matter in any capacity other than the moment.” It reframes these texts to defamiliarize them and draw attention to their odd features.
Conceptual writing has now gained art world legitimacy, and Wershler says that what interests him “is what happens next: how a community based around a formerly marginal writing practice deals with its own relative success,” as with fanfiction after Fifty Shades. The similarities between the two genres, he suggests, are obscured by cultural policing. Both grow out of particular kinds of interpretive communities where people mostly felt comfortable with the other people in their community/subcommunity. But: “Conceptual writing is located within literature and is ambivalent about wanting out. Fanfiction is located without literature and is ambivalent about wanting in.” And while both forms involve repetition with a difference, fanfiction, he argues, is about moving characters to different settings, while conceptual writing is about moving text to different contexts—“for example, by shifting the context of a text’s publication from official courtroom transcripts to a hardbound edition published by a literary small press.” (“Characters read” versions of Harry Potter in which a fan author interlineates characters’ reactions with extensive quotes from Rowling’s books might challenge this divide, but it’s no surprise that they’re controversial.) Creativity comes from copying, which means that, while both genres “might appear to challenge or threaten originality, they also rely on it and reproduce it at other moments”—you can’t have creativity without appropriation, and vice versa.
I adore (though don’t fully agree with) Wershler’s conclusion that conceptual writing might be able to do what poetry hasn’t:
[R]ecognizing the things that look just like it and transpire all around it that are not published as poetry, don’t circulate through literary communities, aren’t received by people as literary texts, but nevertheless could be formally indistinguishable from conceptual writing … and not colonizing them for poetry in the process. There’s a price to pay for that, though: actually giving up the last vestiges of the Romantic notion of author-as-lone-genius, the ones that even a century of modernity refused to erase. In its place, we might install some sort of invisible but open conspiracy that’s capable of appreciating the tactical efficiencies of the things we want to dismiss as cheesy imitations and knockoffs. If makers of conceptual writing and fanfiction really desire to operate differently from culture at large (and I’m no longer sure that this was ever the case), they’d need to produce writers who are not interested in becoming celebrity authors but are willing to dissolve away into the shadows before the laurels can be handed out. Not Warhold’s Factory, but Batman Incorporated.(Where I disagree is the idea that celebrity and anonymity are the two possible poles, though they may certainly be the most likely ones.)
Jonathan Lethem ends the volume on a high note. Building on his great Harper’s piece The Ecstasy of Influence, he argues for disaggregating concepts of transformation, transparency about appropriation, and morality. He provocatively argues that literary culture reacts differently to appropriation than visual etc. arts because literary criticism is too dependent on newspaper journalism. “[W]hereas other fields of art reception are successfully partitioned from ethos of journalists, book reviewers are usually newspapermen who fancy themselves book reviewers. The field of book reviewing so totally overwhelms academic literary criticism in terms of influence, and journalists are of course obsessed with journalistic notions of plagiarism, sources, and inaccuracy. These standards migrate far too much in the realm of literary writing.” Discussing the inevitable dependence of characters on bits borrowed from real people and other characters, he chides: “The dream that this complexity could be neatly sorted out is a very typical American, pragmatist, anti-intellectual fantasy, based on suspicion of the artist or intellectual.” And his description of overreaching intellectual property rights is fantastic. He makes his living in part from copyright, but “It’s like there’s ten miles of frosting on a cake. I like the cake, I might cling to the cake, but it definitely doesn’t need all that frosting.” (I'm reminded of
cesperanza's point that fanworks are all about having your cake and eating it too. That's the point of fanworks--infinite plenitude! Just maybe not so much frosting.Tags: