The ‘Does this make sense?’ check - Introduction, Part 1
Fanfiction does many of the things book historians are interested in, yet it is understudied from a book historical point of view. Fanfiction studies includes copyright and publishing history, reader-author relationships, communal reading practices, and material production. Writing and sharing fanfiction provides insight into contemporary, pop cultural reading practices and creative responses to multimedia texts. Fanfiction offers many entry points for book historians to consider textual production, the future of textual media and the digital book, and reader response. Fanfiction writers and readers alike engage with texts in myriad ways that unsettle many assumptions that book historians take for granted, including Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, the reexamination of which anchors this dissertation.
This dissertation relies on Francesca Coppa’s definition of fanfiction, which articulates six characteristics that illuminate the relationships between fic writers, fic readers, and distributing platforms. These six characteristics of fic are critical to the fic communication circuit: they place fic adjacent to Darnton’s standard model, they challenge ownership and for-profit motives of textual production, and they illustrate a more immediate reader response and creative interpretation than is typical in analogue media:
Fic is ‘created outside of the literary marketplace’, that is, without the intent for profit and without the institutional recognition of traditional publishing.
Fic ‘rewriters and transforms other stories’, and
Fic ‘rewrites and transforms other stories currently owned by others’. Coppa elaborates: ‘it is only in such a system—where storytelling has been industrialized to the point that our shared culture is owned by others—that a category like “fanfiction” makes sense’ [1]. That is to say, in a system where stories can be bought or sold, the transformative, for-pleasure work of fanfiction is defined in contradistinction to for-profit story production and distribution; in a system without purchase and ownership of stories, the work of fanfiction would be called ‘folklore’.
Fic is ‘written within and to the standards of a particular fannish community’: fic writers signal to their readers their understanding of a fandom and place within it using intertextuality and other methods.
Fic is speculative in that it is (often) more interested in ‘character rather than about the world’. Fic provides space to elaborate on internal motivations, examine secondary characters in the source text, and explore how circumstances change a character.
Fic is ‘made for free, but not “for nothing”’, meaning that while fic is rarely made and shared for profit, participants receive satisfaction in the form of kudos, feedback, art, and friendship [2].
These features place fanfiction (and the fanfiction communication circuit) outside of traditional publishing, maintained by different criteria. As a textual practice often associated with women’s crafts, fanfiction shares characteristics with coterie manuscript practices: non-profit driven, for pleasure, and privately produced. Catherine Coker argues that this gendering reinforces the ‘hierarchies of value between print and digital that emphasize traditional patriarchal and public practices of reading and writing over private coterie practices’ [3]. She notes that fanfiction, which is dominated by women and gender-nonconforming people, was born from and is a continuation of these ‘private coterie practices’ that were not valued precisely because they were ‘women’s work’ and ‘not-for-profit’ [4]. In examining the function of writer, reader, and fannish response in the succeeding chapters, I argue that fanfiction attains value and success through community and gift-giving, rather than the norms of profit and mainstream circulation.
Darnton presents a sufficient and adaptable model for describing the relationship between author, printer, publisher, distributor, and reader in his communication circuit [5]. Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires note that in a reconstructed circuit for the digital publishing age, ‘the traditional value chain, …is being disrupted and disintermediated at every stage’ [6]. This disruption in the traditional circuit holds true for the production, dissemination, and consumption of fanfiction. Because fanfiction mostly exists in tandem to the source text upon which it is based and, by extension, the literary marketplace, I model the fanfiction communication circuit in tandem with, rather than superimposed upon, Darnton’s communication circuit. Murray and Squires argue that in digital publishing, the author and publisher roles and the publisher and distributor roles are conflated. In fanfiction (hereafter referred to as fic), production and distribution are similarly conflated, as the publishing (rather, posting) and distributing platforms are one and the same for many interfaces, and the fic writer has sole control over posting their work. These conflations merit a ‘re-examination’ of Darnton’s model, in which I outline a fandom communications circuit in tandem with Darnton’s circuit to parallel, rather the superimpose upon, the circulation of fic text with source text [7].
This dissertation examines transformative works: works that change, even ever so slightly, the metatext unto a given purpose. In 2002, a representative at LucasFilm said, ‘“We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line. We love our fans, we want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is”’ [8]. This statement marks the difference between affirmational and adaptive-transformational fandom (and the notion that creatively responding to a work is somehow not celebrating it) [9]. Transformational fandom is less interested in taking the work as it is, as LucasFilm attempts to dictate, and more interested in intervening in a source text for new or continued storytelling. Transformative fanfiction turns commonly-accepted models of Anglo-American book production on its head: book history often operates under a precept to follow the money. In the case of fanfiction, there is typically no financial compensation, and we must instead follow the fan community. The return is in the gift-economy, comprising kudos, likes, favorites, follows, art, feedback, comments, and further works inspired by one’s own.
Citations
Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), p.7.
Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, pp.2-14.
Catherine Coker, ‘The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 25 (2017)<https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1053>1.2.
Coker, ‘The margins of print?...’, 2.2.
Robert Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’, Daedalus, 111, pp.65-83.
Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires, ‘The digital publishing communications circuit’, Book 2.0, 3 (2013), p.3.
Murray and Squires, ‘The digital publishing communications circuit’, p.4.
Amy Harmon, ‘“Star Wars” Fan Films Come Tumbling Back to Earth’, The New York Times, 28 April, 2002; Maciej Ceglowski, ‘Fan is A Tool-Using Animal’, 6 Sep 2013, <https://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm>.
obsession_inc, ‘Affirmational fandom vs. Transformational fandom’, dreamwidth, 2009 <https://obsession-inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html>.