Salvador Dalí as Fanartist
I visited my father-in-law a while back. He loves--absolutely loves--British murder mysteries on TV. They were, in fact, all we watched the entire time we were visiting him, because he as about eleventy billion episodes downloaded and burned on DVD. We were about to watch Sherlock Holmes, and were discussing different importations of Holmes into
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Firstly, I am so pleased that you referenced Dali's Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus. It is my favourite of his paintings, and when I read the introduction to your post I thought 'ah, yeah he did that with Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus'. So I made myself feel clever at the same time ;)
But there are a lot of good points in this. It's interesting to see the strategies fanfic writers using being compared to Dal's reimagining of other artists' works. There are a lot of similarities there, and they make perfect sense in either universe.
Dali and fanfic writers are doing the same thing.
"Because," I snarked, "if you write fanfiction for something more than a hundred years old, you can publish it."
Yes. It always interests me how fanfic that's a) over a hundred years old b) based on a classic book or c) not fangirls flailing on the web becomes somehow more than fanfic. I studied Wide Sargasso Sea for A Level English and the fact that it's a piece of fan fiction based on a secondary character in Jane Eyre was turned into it being a 'literary masterpiece telling the story that Brontë omitted to tell', 'a postmodern response to Jane Eyre' and a 'inspired by Charlotte Bronte's classic'. It might be all of those, but it's still fanfiction.
I was thinking about the boundaries between what is legitimate reworking of a text or set of facts in a literary context and what is loser fangirls writing porn on the internet
Base it on a literary masterpiece, tell us something new about a secondary character and throw in some insights on an -ism of your choice and I think you've got the boundaries set. Ok, that's somewhat flippant, but if writers can create great pieces of fanfiction based on The X Files, for example, tell the readers something new about a secondary character and the world in which we live - why can't that be a legitimate reworking of a text?
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