Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Samutina
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Reading First ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Literary Experience

This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’.

The Business of Rhyming: Burma-Shave Poetry and Popular Culture

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Mike Chasar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Creative Forces

This essay uses the example of the long‐lived and popular Burma‐Shave advertising campaign to argue that literary critics should extend their attention to the vast amounts of poetry written for advertising purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burma‐Shave campaign—which featured sequences of rhyming billboards erected along highways in the United States from 1926 to 1963—not only cultivated characteristics of literary and even avantgarde writing but effectively pressured that literariness into serving the commercial marketplace. At the same time, as the campaign's reception history shows, the spirit of linguistic play and innovation at the core of Burma‐Shave's poetry unintentionally distracted consumers' attention away from the commercial message and toward the creative forces of reading and writing poetry. A striking example of popular reading practices at work, this history shows how poetry created even in the most commercial contexts might resist the commodification that many twentieth‐century poets and critics feared. (MC)

scholarly journals Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Duggan
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
The Many ◽  
Harry Potter Novels

AbstractThe politics of children’s literature and the actors surrounding it have never been more visible than they are now, in the digital age. As one of the first children’s series to gain widespread popularity concurrently with the spread of the internet, the Harry Potter septet arrived on the global stage at the perfect moment to develop an avid, connected fandom. But the fandom has laid bare the many conflicting ideologies of the fans themselves and of the actors surrounding the texts. This article examines the contentious issue of gender nonnormativity and its relation to the Harry Potter texts, the queer/trans reading practices and political resistance common to the fandom, and the ongoing disagreements over gender, made visible on social media, between Rowling and the fans of her series. The article discusses the Harry Potter novels’ varied and conflicting ideologies; queer/trans readings of the Potter septet, including both invitations and resistances to queer/trans reading by Rowling herself; how gender is queered and queried in and through fan fiction; and finally, the recent hostilities between Rowling and her fans. It concludes by discussing the worsening relationship between Rowling and her fans and highlighting how fans are using their collective power to undermine Rowling’s gender politics through fan fiction. By doing so, the article traces the complex politics of the reception of books for young people in the digital age, demonstrating that authors’ powerful voices continue to shape readers’ responses to texts long after their publication but showing, too, that readers often resist authors’ attempts to influence not only their textual interpretations but their politics.

scholarly journals “Tell it to Harry Potter, would you suddenly meet him”: Sf&F Fan Fiction as a Post-Folklore Genre of the WWW Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Cyril Korolev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Role Playing Games ◽  
Quantitative Characteristics ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Further Development

The article examines the current situation in the modern Russian net-literature, where, along with the predominance of romantic fantasy and theso-called Lit-RPG (stories based on computer role-playing games), there is a rise of fan fiction, i. e. amateur fiction based on milestones (literary and cinematic — books, films, TV series, anime, computer games, etc.) of popular culture. As a special subgenre of amateur creativity, fan fiction has emerged in the English-speaking culture in the 1930s, then the emergence of the Internet has contributed to its spread and further development, and in the 1999-2000s a Russian-speaking segment of fan fiction has been formed, significant in volume and diverse in topics. This work examines the genesis of this kind of neterature and reveals the post-folklore nature of modern fan fiction, defines fan fiction as a specific phenomenon of modern popular culture, characterizes the peculiarities of fan fiction as a subject of scientific research, and provides some quantitative characteristics of the corpus of Russian-language fan fiction. The article presents outlines and prospects for further study.

scholarly journals I would prefer not to turn the page: Reading and Writing in the Unlimited Digital Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-148
Author(s):  
Ana Sabino
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Infinite Space ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Digital Edition ◽  
Physical Limit ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener

The limits of the page have been historically set by the constrictions of the materials on which the text is inscribed. In the digital age, those materials no longer impose a physical limit, and the limits are more bound to what are our established reading practices and conventions. We still need to access the text in finite portions — we cannot process the infinitude of text that the limitless digital space would allow. Hence, notions as window or frame appear to make this infinite space readable — not unlike the ancient practice of reading and writing on a scroll, which contained large texts, but could only be read portion by portion. Nowadays, we no longer simply turn a page and leave it behind; in our perception, it is more like a frame is constantly being repositioned. In order to question this transition and its implications, we will be looking at a paper and a digital edition of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

scholarly journals Fanfiction: Morality Challenges in Hyperreality Worlds

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellita Permata Widjayanti ◽  
Chaerul Anwar
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Free Access ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Sexual Fantasies ◽  
Moral Ethics ◽  
Using Data

In 4.0 era, in which popular culture is flourishing, fanfiction is experiencing rapid growth. Many fans write about their idols, characters in movies, anime, games, and TV series. They make simulations, create simulacra, and hyperreality. Unfortunately, there are many fan-fiction productions which have pornographic content that is not in accordance with Indonesian cultural norms and moral ethics. This then becomes a moral challenge for the nation, especially for the youth, as they have free access to the internet. This research aims to look the challenges of morality within fanfiction, explaining it through the theory of hyperreality by using data taken from popular fanfiction platforms. The results show that pornography contained in fanfiction poses a threat to the moral codes of teenage readers, and renders pornographic practices more common. Besides, the hyperreality fosters sexual fantasies, which may lead to sexual harassment, free sex, and deviant sex. Keywords: fanfiction, simulation, simulacra, hyperreality, pornography, morality

scholarly journals Boys Don't Read - It's True!

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Skuy
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Demographic Group ◽  
Grade Levels ◽  
Spiritual Impact

Few educational experts would disagree that school-aged boys are falling behind their female counterparts in terms of reading and writing, a gap that both increases with grade levels, and has increased in recent years. Recent studies suggest this trend is not isolated to one geographic region or demographic group. It is all boys across North America and Europe. As a father of a seven-year old son, I worry about my son reading as he gets older. As an author of a Young Adult book series for boys, I worry if there is a market for my books. By the time high school hits over half of all boys describe themselves as non-readers. To make matters worse, the publishing industry has figured this out - and 'Boy Books' have disappeared from the shelves (apart from Harry Potter and its legions of copycats). The economic impact of poor literacy skills for half the population is self-evident. The spiritual impact of a child deprived of one of the great pleasures in life is less obvious, but perhaps even more detrimental to society.

scholarly journals Their Labyrinth Mouths of History

Linguaculture ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Marcela Sulak
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Historical Moment

This paper outlines reading strategies to help map Hart Crane’s book-length poem, The Bridge, as a repository of American runes and writing. Contextualizing the poem in the philosophical, historical, and popular culture that influenced its creation, we can examine Hart Crane’s linguistic condensation, puns, and etymological play as techniques for balancing the clash between eternity and secular history upon which America was founded, rehearsed in The Bridge in the clash between secular a-temporality and the historical moment.

scholarly journals Cultural accumulation and improvement in online fan fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Pianzola ◽  
Alberto Acerbi ◽  
Simone Rebora
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Evolution Theory ◽  
Digital Literary Studies

We analyse stories in Harry Potter fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3), using concepts from cultural evolution. In particular, we focus on cumulative cultural evolution, that is, the idea that cultural systems improve with time, drawing on previous innovations. In this study we examine two features of cumulative culture: accumulation and improvement. First, we show that stories in Harry Potter’s fan fiction accumulate cultural traits—unique tags, in our analysis—through time, both globally and at the level of single stories. Second, more recent stories are also liked more by readers than earlier stories. Our research illustrates the potential of the combination of cultural evolution theory and digital literary studies, and it paves the way for the study of the effects of online digital media on cultural cumulation.

Elizabeth Bowen and the Pleasure of the Text

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Mutual Engagement ◽  
Poststructuralist Theory ◽  
Theory Of Reading ◽  
The Impact

This chapter recognises that while several authors in the extant criticism have used various lenses of critical theory through which to analyse Bowen’s work, a case for Bowen as a theorist herself has not yet been made. Through an analysis of Bowen’s critical essays, reviews, and depictions of reading and writing in her fiction, this chapter proposes a logic of literary theory as it emerges in her work. Bowen’s theory of reading does anticipate, in some ways, poststructuralist theory as it appears in the work of Roland Barthes, particularly in terms of her syntactical evocations of trauma. Where her work differs (or defers) from theirs, however, is in her insistence upon a kind of mindless and spontaneous memory-work which describes the impact of the reader and the text upon each other and the production of pleasure engendered through this relationship. It is in the process of this mutual engagement, Bowen’s work suggests, that each comes into being. This essay will thus argue for the innovation present in Bowen’s understanding of reading and writing as an anticipation and an inflection of later poststructuralist theory.

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