but Dante basically wrote fanfic too!
sorry but nope. and I think we all know that on some level but can’t quite pinpoint why. (I’m just blathering a bit here about distinctions between fanfiction and “literary” fiction and why it’s not helpful to collapse the boundaries between them. Got kinda long, oops)
From the intro of "The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction,” an article in Transformative Works and Cultures:
It has become almost a cliché of fan studies to place fan fiction in a much older tradition of transformative literatures in which the author works with a preexisting story or set of stories well known to his or her audience, such as classical epic poetry or medieval romances. . . . These comparisons often focus on the literary resemblances between these two genres, primarily the similarity of form: both fan fiction and these premodern genres use sophisticated allusion and intertextuality to create new meanings, and both assume a knowledgeable audience with a shared understanding of their source. However, such comparisons run the risk of losing sight of both the importance of fan fiction's attitude toward its source (or canon) and the significance of affect in how fan fiction functions as a literary genre. Fan fiction assumes an audience that not only knows a story but (by and large) loves it, and this loving intimacy is at the heart of fan fiction's drive to deliver "'more of' or 'more from'" (Pugh 2005, 29) a story, world, or set of characters.
Making this comparison devalues both mediums because it overlooks the intentions of both. Fic and quote-unquote literary fiction (however you want to define it) don’t serve the same purposes, and they aren’t aimed at the same audiences. Sure, maybe you read both, but you’re not approaching them from the same perspective when you do—even if The Inferno makes you super sad, you’re not going to write a reaction paper about how sad it made you, because that would be missing the point of The Inferno.
But writing a gushy comment on a fic about your feelings is perfectly valid! Even if a fic is trying to do other things, we generally approach fic as a genre from the perspective of wanting to read more about a character or universe and feel more about them—fic is about affect, the characters’ affect, the readers’ affect, etc. (And if you see that as a diss or whatever on fic, then you’re missing the point.)
The article linked above gets more into why we can call fanfic as a genre affective by looking at case studies of Yuletide prompts, and discusses the significance of that affective basis. Among other things: “It is clear that the affective hermeneutics used in fan fiction—the focus on intense affect, the desire to inhabit it, to imagine it, and to understand it—has particular resonance for marginal communities whose histories must be read between the lines.” There’s a reason fandom spaces are a draw for queer folks and women.
Anyway, I just think fandom folks should read the article. It made a lot of things click for me as far as how I engage in fandom spaces both as a reader and as a writer.
