term paper! fan fiction and the academy
I know, all of you are dying to read my term papers. RIGHT?? :P But I think this one's fun. It's all about fanfic, pop fiction, and the EVIL ACADEMY THAT'S HOLDING THEM DOWN!! lol It's full of generalizations and highly wrought language, but it makes a point. :)
Fan Fiction and Power in the Literary Academy
Fan fiction is a genre of literature that metafictionally examines how readers receive and respond to literature, film, and television shows. This genre of literature is often spread through new media and arises out of international communities that form around the appreciation of particular texts. Much of the production and reception of this fan fiction is in the hands of women and is not under the control of outside publishers, thus allowing participants to more freely express themselves to one another. Works in this genre often comment on topics such as gender and queer sexuality. What is perhaps most astounding is the amount of work in this genre available for study: statisticians estimate that the number of works of fan fiction available online may have been as high as 50,000 to one million in the year 2000 (Curtin). It has grown significantly since. Yet despite the treasure trove of material this genre presents to the study of literature, very little work on it has come out of the academic community, and most of it has come from sociologists rather than literature scholars.
Fan fiction is literature that has been written by a fan of a particular film, television series, or novel, using the characters and settings of the original work. Contemporary fan fiction as it is generally defined was first circulated in hardcopy Star Trek fanzines in the Trekker fan communities of the sixties, seventies and eighties,* and is now even more broadly circulated (in many more fandoms than Star Trek) via the internet. As of June 25, 2010, the largest online compendium of fan fiction, Fanfiction.net, was hosting 3,256,278 publicly accessible pieces of fan fiction ("FanFiction.net Story Totals"). The total amount of fan fiction that has been produced is unknowable.
[*See the second edition of Joan Marie Verba's Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987 (Minnetonka: FTL, 2003) for an extensive discussion. (Available online at ).]
Fan fiction has been generally ignored as literature by the academy; most of the scholarly attention to this genre has come from the fields of sociology, media studies, women’s studies, and anthropology. Scholars in these fields have focused much more on the fans themselves and their communities than on the work they have produced. But the fan fiction texts themselves constitute a rich field of study for literary scholars. So why have they studied them so little? Though there are a number of reasons why fan fiction has been so neglected by scholars, most of these come down to a question of power and prestige. Fan fiction is ignored by the literary academy because this genre is democratic and derivative in nature: two characteristics that mark it in the minds of scholars as being of little prestige. However, by ignoring fan fiction and popular genres like it, the literary academy is reinforcing a hegemonic hierarchy of literature in which texts which are considered more "original," or written in certain styles, are disseminated and lauded while others are silenced. It is also failing to study a huge portion of the textual works of contemporary society.
Practical and Legal Deterrents
One of the reasons why so little scholarly work on fan fiction has been done by the literary academy is that there is too much of it to know where to start or how to form a comprehensive idea of the whole. It is a sad paradox that as this body of work has expanded until the number of texts is in the multiple millions, the size of the body of work has looked increasingly unmanageable in terms of scholarly analysis. The amount of available material is simply overwhelming. Even the very few scholars who have attempted some literary analysis of fan fiction have had to limit themselves to very small segments of the genre as a whole. Sheenagh Pugh, in The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, confines her studies to five fandoms in which she has read extensively: Jane Austen, Discworld, Blakes 7, The Bill, and Horatio Hornblower. As Pugh observes, “I am not claiming an exhaustive knowledge of fan fiction in print and online. Nobody could; the quantities of material involved render it impossible. . . . My experience as a reader is partial; in some ways it may be typical in others not. One has to start somewhere” (7). However, it is worth pointing out that the very fact that there is so much unexamined material available should spur scholars to, like Pugh, start somewhere.
A second problem of practicality in the study of fan fiction is its transience. The 3.2 million publicly accessible works on Fanfiction.net mentioned earlier are only a little over half of the total number of works the website has tracked: 46%-47% of the website’s content consists of deleted stories. The statisticians at FFN Research observe that “nearly half of all stories posted [on Fanfiction.net] will sooner or later disappear” ("FanFiction.net Story Totals"). Why write a study on a work that may not even exist publicly by the time your article has been published?
But the transience of fan fiction as a genre is partly tied to the vexed question of its legality: fan works would likely have more permanence if they had more protection under the law. As of January 1, 2012, works written before 1923 are legally in the public domain, and fan fiction writers may do with them as they please and even officially publish their fan fiction without fear of legal reprisal: witness the number of sequels to Jane Austen’s novels that have been published recently**, or the proliferating adaptations and extensions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories***. However, a great deal of contemporary online fan fiction, if not most, is written from more recent works, including film and television series. The fan fiction for this may be published solely online or even in fanzines, but the publication of such fan fiction is legally questionable. Chilling Effects, “a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics,” is a website devoted to explaining First Amendment rights as they pertain to online activities. On the page “FAQ about Fan Fiction,” Chilling Effects explains,
If a Fan Fiction author uses copyrighted elements in someone else's work in his/her story, then the fan fiction may be a derivative work. There are many elements of a work that an author can borrow. The law, however, does not clearly define whether fictitious characters, worlds, histories and names are copyright protected. . . . The prevailing rule seems to be that a character is copyrightable separate from the original work if the character is "distinctly delineated." Authors can have a separate copyright protection for the characters in their works only if they have been developed and constitute original expression. Generic characters (the sidekick, for example) are not protected. Some courts require this delineation to be quite extensive, to the point that the character "constitutes the story being told." (“FAQ about Fan Fiction”)
[**See the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series by Quirk Books, Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James, or the ITV miniseries Lost in Austen, among others.]
[***These include the BBC television series Sherlock, the upcoming series Elementary on CBS, the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series by Titan Books, and the Professor Moriarty novels by Kim Newman.]
Fan fiction writers themselves almost always freely admit that they are working within the “canon” of another author’s creation, and they usually borrow much more than generic characters. But this does not necessarily mean that the fan fiction writer would not legally be able to create this fan fiction: fan fiction might be allowed under the “fair use” exception. Chilling Effects explains:
The fair use doctrine says that otherwise copyrighted works may be used for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. To decide whether a use is "fair use" or not, courts consider:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Parody is also fair use.
Under this doctrine, artists have been permitted to create and display their art even if it uses copyrighted works of others. . . . Whether a court will view this as the case for a particular work of fan fiction depends on how much of the story relies on copyrighted materials, whether the story is sold, or affects the market for the copyrighted work, and other factors. (“FAQ about Fan Fiction”)
Some therefore would argue that fan fiction is an infringement of copyright, while other would argue that it falls under “fair use.” In any case, its questionable legality adds to fan fiction's reputation as a less legitimate literary form and consequently may make it seem less worthy of study.
However, fan fiction could and should be considered fair use on two grounds: it neither harms the "original" creator financially nor impinges upon that creator's intellectual rights more than other acts of interpretation, such as scholarship, do. Copyright law is in place for two reasons: to protect the creator of the work financially by barring any unauthorized person from profiting from the work, and to protect the creator’s intellectual property. On the first count, it could be argued that fan fiction not only does not endanger the author’s profits, but actually increases them. ChillingEffects points out, “In order for a corporation to win a cease-and-desist order against a FanFic author, it would have to prove that it was suffering financial damage, something that is hard to prove since much of FanFic actually helps boost sales” ("FAQ about Fan Fiction"). Reading fan fiction does not give the audience the same experience as reading or watching the source text: reading a fic about the romance between Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks, be it ever so many chapters long, is not a replacement for reading the Harry Potter series itself. Fan fiction amplifies the ways one can understand the source text-and adds to the number of adventures had by characters of that text-but it does not seek to replace the source text or impinge on its primacy. In fact, experiencing the source text is often necessary to understand the fan fiction in the first place. Thus fan fiction can in fact increase the sales of the source texts by building hype for them. I can state from my own experience that there are a number of books, television shows and films that I would never have read or watched if I had not encountered fan fiction and other fan activities related to those sources: I wanted to see the show so that I could understand the fan fiction.
Fan fiction also does not impinge on the original authors' rights to their intellectual property. Intellectual property rights are based on the idea that the creator of the work has ownership of that work and the exclusive right to it: the right to decide what happens to his or her characters and to the fictional world that he or she has created. However, it is not actually possible to have exclusive rights to one's work. Every reader will interpret the text as he or she sees fit; every reader is free to imagine alternative endings, new characters, and new interactions between existing characters. In fact scholars, through the fair use doctrine, are allowed to completely reinterpret works and to change many people’s perceptions of those works. It is quite likely, for instance, that Jane Austen would be very surprised to discover that Mansfield Park is now often seen as a discussion of slavery: this is a result of scholarly reinterpretation. Once a work is in the hands of the public, the amount of control that the author can exert over that work is indeed quite limited. And as far as the copyright laws themselves work in terms of intellectual property, Mark A. Lemley notes that “Intellectual property rights . . . are granted only when-and only to the extent that-they are necessary to encourage invention” (1031). This is why copyrights are so limited and why works can eventually come into the public domain. Lemley concludes, “On this view, the proper goal of intellectual property law is to give as little protection as possible consistent with encouraging innovation” (1031). Since fan fiction writers conventionally put disclaimers at the top of their chapters indicating that they do not own the rights to the characters, and since they almost always indicate quite clearly that they are playing in someone else’s sandbox, fan fiction should not be seen as a threat, either to the finances or the ultimate intellectual property of the source author. Fan fiction is simply innovation that is inspired by the work of another author.
The Issue of Originality
The question of fan fiction’s legality is only one small part of a much larger deterrent to its prestige and study in the academy: the biggest problem with fan fiction, as seen by literary scholars, is its lack of originality. In order to qualify as a piece of fan fiction, the work in question must be derivative. It cannot follow its source material word-for-word, but it also must have a substantial and noticeable link to a piece of “original” fiction. Originality in art is greatly prized in the academy, so this kind of derivative work is not much valued. However, the judgment that original literature is better literature is not universal, but a social construct. In fact, the closer we examine the perceived dichotomy between original and derivative work, the more artificial the distinction seems. Through its emphasis on "originality" and its own judgments on what constitutes a "good" writing style the academy, rather than studying the actual literature of the general culture, silences many of its voices. The academy needs to recognize the power it has over the literary judgments of the culture and reexamine the power structures it is reinforcing.
The emphasis the academy, and thus our contemporary culture, places on originality is not universal in the appreciation of literature. On the contrary, it is a relatively recent phenomenon in western culture. Even today, though the emphasis on originality is part of the ideology of contemporary literary criticism and thus guides scholars in their judgment of what counts as Literature, it does not hold uncontested sway in our society. Originality has not always been considered desirable. The revered and oft-studied Chaucer, like many other medieval authors, does not seem to have been at all worried that he was borrowing material wholesale from other writers. As Pugh points out, there is even "a mediaeval convention of authorial modesty whereby writers routinely claim that they found the story they are about to tell us in some ancient book” (13). Works that were derivative in nature were considered to have better authority, and therefore higher prestige, than original works. This attitude was not limited to the medieval period: Shakespeare drew material from Plutarch, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and more, and, as David A. Brewer extensively demonstrates in The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825, the long eighteenth century was a time of prolific creation of derivative works, many of which strongly resemble contemporary fan fiction. Some scholars pinpoint the Romantic period as the time in which creative originality was first held up as the ideal in art and literature, but some scholars are beginning to question this statement: Tilar J. Mazzeo demonstrates in her book Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period that Romantic conceptions of plagiarism were not as strict as our current ones. Even after the Romantic period originality was not necessarily the ideal for artistic work: in Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature Robert Macfarlane argues that “from the late 1850s onwards, unoriginality-understood as the inventive reuse of the words of others-came increasingly to be discerned as an authentic form of creativity” (8). It is only in the last two or three hundred years that our culture has begun to put so much emphasis on originality, and that emphasis seems to have grown rapidly in the twentieth century.
Our culture's recent obsession with artistic originality is curious, especially given the artificiality of the concept. The more one studies fan fiction, the more blurred the lines between derivative fiction and original fiction appear. A story about Kirk and Spock published in a fanzine is fan fiction, but a novel by the same author, published with the blessing of the franchise, might be considered part of the “canon” of Star Trek and as legitimate and “original” as the rest of the communally-created franchise. The novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies could clearly be considered fan fiction, but then what about the great Henry Fielding’s “Shamela”, a satire on Samuel Richardson’s 1741 novel Pamela? It uses the same characters, settings and events as Richardson’s original novel, like Zombies does with Austen's. Is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King fan fiction based on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, or is it a legitimate artistic work because it is derived from a shared "myth kitty" rather than a single author's work? Looking backward through the history of literature, all of these works could be called fan fiction by today’s standards. In fact, all literature could be considered derivative in some degree: every author borrows, more or less, from the authors who have gone before him or her, taking characters (though often changing the names), situations, tropes, settings, and plot points from the literature that s/he has read. Even the works that seem the most startlingly original, such as James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses, or Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" borrow material from earlier authors-in fact, Richard A. Posner describes "The Waste Land" as "a tissue of quotations (without quotation marks) from earlier literature" (55). There is no clear place to draw the line between originality and derivation; our contemporary idea that some works are acceptably original and others are not is a social construct that is reinforced by the literary academy itself, which will only study those works which it considers "original."
The actual taste of the public is often opposed to the tastes of the academy. The culture as a whole does not necessarily prize originality so strictly as the academy does: despite the emphasis so often put on originality in art in contemporary society, there is still a thirst for more of the same old thing. The very existence of fan fiction itself testifies to this thirst. James Hurman also reminds us of the public's taste for the derivative in film:
Forty films from history have grossed over $500 million globally. Twenty-six are adaptations from popular books or comics (such as Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man), sequels to previously successful franchises (Star Wars, The Matrix) or adaptations of historical stories (Titanic, The Passion of the Christ), rendering them unoriginal from conception. The remaining 14 big hitters-such as Independence Day, Ghost and Armageddon-all follow the formulaic three-act linear structure that Hollywood demands.
The literary academy has a tendency to divide itself from the popular culture, and instead of studying the works that are most popular and most widely disseminated and thus have the greatest impact on contemporary culture, it studies only those works it deems, by its own criteria, to be worthy. It therefore divorces itself from the objects it purports to study: the literary productions of our culture.
Power and the Academy
This does not mean that the literary academy, sitting divorced from the world in its ivory tower, has no impact on general society. On the contrary, its dictates and standards for what makes good or bad literature are listened to and disseminated beyond academia, and produce a culture of individuals that disdain their own favorite art and literature as trashy, or attempt (like the stereotypical hipster) to define themselves in opposition to the culture at large. An example of this sort of cultural multiple personality disorder can be seen in the reception of Twilight. The Twilight novels have been undeniably popular: "Stephenie Meyer sold more books in 2008 than any other author (22 million, according to her publisher) and did what no else-not even J.K. Rowling-has done in the 15 years of USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list: She swept the four top slots in 2008's best sellers with her Twilight series" (Minzesheimer and DeBarros). That's not even mentioning the popularity of the films based on these books. Yet Twilight has experienced a severe backlash from the culture and is often excoriated as terrible writing. Jacqueline M. Pinkowitz, in her article on the Twilight "antifandom", notes how scholarly discourse has helped to shape the virulent criticisms of these novels:
Fearful of a low ranking on the cultural hierarchy, [Twilight antifans] have created their own internal fan hierarchy that, according to cultural notions about the superiority of class, education, and the elite over the uneducated and the popular, as well as of the dismissability of girl culture, ensures the dominance and safety of their own affected rationality over the characterized emotional and excessive behavior of rabid Twilight fans and antifans. Part of the performance of such scholarly affectation involves appropriating discourses of academia into their literary criticism of Twilight, so as to overcome any negative connotations of excess or susceptibility to the mass media. (Pinkowitz, emphasis mine)
The general culture has picked up on the way that scholarly discourse hierarchizes "high" literature over "popular" literature and uses this hierarchy to disdain the most popular of its contemporary literary works.
The academy holds great power in legitimating some genres and styles of literature in the eyes of the culture and denigrating others. Through its selection of texts that are worthy of study, it ensures that only works that meet its standards will be seen as “Literature.” Those works which it does not judge as making the cut, though they may be greatly enjoyed by the larger society-perhaps more enjoyed than many of what are considered "great works of Literature"-are still viewed as inferior efforts. The wider culture, vaguely aware of the roster of what the literary academy considers great works, then sometimes disdains its own literary output, regardless of the actual merit of that output. It then reinforces the literary academy's position as the arbiter of taste, since scholars are those who read, enjoy, and study works that may be seen by the general public as more meritorious, but less enjoyable or accessible. By studying some works and ignoring others, the literary academy is reinforcing its own power in the culture, in our literature, and in our language. What counts as "Literature" is a question, not of the dictionary definition of the word, but of power. Because the academy defines what is "original" and values more highly the literature that is so defined, the culture ensures that "original" works are offered legal protection that derivative works are not afforded. Because the authors of derivative works are denied legal protection, they are also denied the economic incentives of traditional publishing and cultural support for their labor.
We can see clearly that the academy's categorization of original works as more legitimate and worthy of study than derivative works is a question of power when we examine the special case of satire and parody. As noted above in the discussion of legality, “Parody is also fair use” ("FAQ about Fan Fiction"). Why is parody, which borrows ideas from existing works in order to mock them, considered fair use while fan fiction, which borrows ideas from existing works in order to celebrate and extend them, is considered legally gray? If the academy studies (and praises) satires like Fielding’s Shamela, why doesn't it study and praise fan fiction? The answer lies in the power dynamics involved in parody and fan fiction. When a satirist parodies the work of another author, the satirist places him/herself above that author: by mocking the author’s work, the satirist is putting the author down. However, when a fan composes a piece of fan fiction, the fan is seen as subordinating him/herself to the other author. Thus the “original” author is upheld as an originating genius, while the fan is seen as a mere dabbler in someone else’s masterpiece. Parody has an illusion of power over the original work that fan fiction does not; parody is thus accorded more prestige by the academy, which influences the general public through its own power and prestige. The culture thus concludes that parody should be protected by law as "fair use," while fan fiction, which has not been so favored by the literary gods, is relegated to a gray area of insecure legality. That which the academy defines as "parody" rather than "derivative literature" is defined by law as "fair use" rather than "copyright infringement." Both the academy and the law use language to exert power over authors and decide which works will be lauded and protected and which will be denigrated and attacked.
Fan fiction is opposed to this power structure by its very nature. It is, as Pugh points out, a “democratic genre”. By altering and/or adding to an existing work, the fan writer may actually be seen as putting him/herself on the same level as the original author. In a sense, the fan writer is claiming the authority to alter the original work and is thus putting him/herself on the level of the original writer. Authors who write fan fiction based on the works of great authors such as Jane Austen could be seen as positioning themselves on a level playing field with Austen: they are claiming the authority to alter Austen's writing, and the authority to write and to have their peers read their work, just as Austen did. Likewise, fan fiction writers can be seen as being on the same level with one another. Each fan text presents an alternative version of the source material, and none of those alternative versions is subordinated to another-they all have equal legitimacy and are equally "possible." Thus the authors of fan fiction create a huge, democratic writing community in which they are all on the same level, and in a sense see themselves as being on the same level as more "legitimately" published authors. In this way, fan culture can be seen as ignoring and opposing the dictates of the literary academy to a greater degree than the general culture-which, basing its judgments and behavior on the behavior of the academy, either remains ignorant of the existence of fan culture or views it as alien or aberrant. Members of fan culture are "weird," a way for the culture to use language to marginalize and separate themselves from those who might, with more prestige, threaten the power of the copyright law or the literary academy's dictates.
Fan fiction is democratic in other ways than simply in terms of how fan fiction writers position themselves in relation to the original text. Partly because of its lack of legal protection, fan fiction also avoids the shibboleth of traditional publishing. Anyone with a word processor and internet access can publish fan fiction. Unlike “traditionally” published fiction, fan fiction can go public without the censorship, selection, and control of an editor, proofreader, or publishing company. If fan fiction is proofread, the proofreader, called a "beta", is a fellow member of the fan community, and by definition, a peer rather than an authority figure. Some scholars feel that because it avoids the "quality control" of professional editors and proofreaders, fan fiction must be of low literary merit: someone who has been indoctrinated with the academy's concepts of good versus bad literature is needed to weed out the bad literature and keep it from being published.
But by not studying works that are published outside of the traditional process, the academy is reinforcing the authority of the traditional press as the bestower of artistic merit, which decides which pieces will or will not be published, and which voices will or will not be heard. The press is capable of silencing those writers whose work does not fit its concept of high art. It also rewards those who do by helping them to earn money from their writing, something that fan fiction writers cannot do for fear of the copyright laws. By publishing online, then, the fan community ignores the power of the academy, the law, the press, and the dollar to censor artistic expression. In this economy of art, the publishers make no money and the public can enjoy fan fiction for free. The academy, by ignoring and thus refusing to bestow its blessing upon non-traditionally published genres, reinforces a system of economic gain for traditional publishing and a system where artistic merit is confirmed by sales-which is odd, since (as we have already noted) many of the kinds of works that are supported by the academy do not sell as well as more "popular" genres. Again, this creates a strange schizophrenia in our culture, in which we simultaneously laud works that make money and denigrate works that make too much money: we love "low" art and denigrate it for being low art****.
[****I had a student once who wanted to write a research paper on the question, "Why do we like pop music so much, if it's so bad?" When I asked him why he thought pop music was bad, he couldn't answer: he just kept saying "Because it is!" The academy has insisted that "pop" art is equated with bad art, and the culture has accepted the judgment.]
A third way in which fan fiction is "democratic" is in its style, which might be considered less “literary” and more “of the people.” The style of prose that is most common in the genre of English-language fan fiction is not one with much prestige in the academy. For instance, in contrast to much contemporary "high" literature, which attempts to eliminate "telling" in favor of "showing", a great deal of fan fiction is not shy about telling the audience exactly what is going on, fully describing characters' emotions and thoughts where contemporary literature in a more "literary" style would leave these things to the inference of the reader. To give an example, the writing style of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is rather similar to a great deal of fan fiction: Lev Grossman wrote in Time Magazine that the books “have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction” (Grossman 2). Try asking a room full of literary scholars what they think of the style of Twilight-just make sure you’ve cleared plenty of time in your schedule for the exercise.
Again, the academy’s support of one style of writing over another is based on arbitrary social constructs of taste that neither necessarily match the tastes of the general reading public nor are questioned by society, since literary scholars are seen as the arbiters of literary merit. They are the ones with the authority to decide how language may or may not be used, and when it is not used to their satisfaction, they make sure that it is labeled "low art." The authors of fan fiction have not complied with the standards set by the academy, have ignored the authority of the academy, and are punished and marginalized in order to bolster the power of the academy. The academy's standards are obviously arbitrary, since what is considered a "literary" style differs depending on when work was written. Well-respected works from the eighteenth and nineteenth century include much more "telling" than twenty- and twenty-first-century literature. Though the literary style of fan fiction does not currently have much prestige in the academy, it cannot be considered objectively worse writing than works which do: judgment of style is a matter of opinion. I don't like many works of high modernism, which is why I leave the study of it to scholars who do. A simple dislike for the style of a work among some individuals is no reason why it should not be studied by others, and there are literary scholars who do read and enjoy fan fiction. They should not be discouraged from doing research on it by implied threats of their work having low prestige in the academy and thus being less likely to help them get a job. The hierarchy of high and low art cannot be much changed by the academy until the academy stops punishing its own scholars who are attempting to make the change.
In sum, when the literary academy deems some genres to be worthy of study and others to be beyond the pale, what it is really reinforcing is its own power in the culture to decide what is good literature and what is not. It attempts to silence those voices that disagree with it through the authority, direct or indirect, which it exerts on literary reputation, the law, and the economic system of traditional publishing. The power of the academy to influence the culture's concepts of high versus low art and acceptable versus unacceptable publishing works to ensure that genres like fan fiction that are carried on without the academy's approval are marginalized and thus silenced. Only some forms of artistic expression, the academy seems to say, only some ways of responding to texts, are artistically and socially acceptable, and we are the people with the authority to separate the sheep from the goats.
Benefits
So much for the reasons why fan fiction should not be ignored or disdained by the academy. But why should the academy spend time trying to carve its way into the thick and endless jungle of online fan fiction? What are the incentives for it to do so?
First of all, the literary academy can find ample play for some of its favorite topics within the genre of fan fiction. One piece of fan fiction that actually is a popular object of study in the literary academy is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a fan prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This piece is popular among academics because it examines themes of racism and colonialism in Brontë’s novel, and is written in a style that the academy appears to approve of. Scholars such as Trevor Hope*^* discuss how Jean Rhys "writes back" to Charlotte Brontë and criticizes the assumptions of the novel. Yet a great deal of contemporary fan fiction could be seen as doing the same thing, in various ways: fan fiction is a "writing back" to the original authors. Its democratic nature also makes it a place where people who would not be capable of making their voices heard in traditional publishing can reshape stories from the mass media into new and personal creations.
[*^*See "Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness," College Literature 39.1 (Winter 2012), 51-73.]
Fan fiction is also a predominantly female genre (Knobloch). It is therefore available as a place to study how women position themselves in relation to texts and how they “write back” to texts. And the fact that “slash” or homoerotic fiction is so popular in fan fiction also makes this genre a fertile field for the study of queer theory. If the academy decided that fan fiction was not a genre below its notice, it would soon discover that fan fiction is a broad and fascinating field for considering many of academia’s pet topics, some of them being discussed in ways that it had not been hitherto encountered or emphasized. The academy might even begin to listen to the messages the fan fiction writers themselves are sending through their work, and discover new themes of literature to concentrate on. Harold Bloom wrote of the anxiety of influence, but the joyful and obvious borrowing from the work of other artists and authors surely deserves at least as much critical attention.
The fact that so many members of the reading public enjoy fan fiction is another reason it should be studied. Fanfiction.net alone had approximately 2.2 million accounts as of 2009 (Knobloch). This is only one fan site; there are many more sites that host fan fiction. Victoria Knobloch writes in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian that the “relatively new” site “Archive of Our Own (AO3) recently passed 40,000 users, who have contributed 332,300 works-including works besides fic-across over 8,800 fandoms, nearly doubling their number of users since September 2011” (Knobloch). Fan fiction is obviously a very popular genre, and as such, it is deserving of study as a genre of contemporary literature.
Not only so, but fan fiction is related to recent postmodern trends the media. Fan fiction engages in metafiction, collaboration, mixtures of high and low culture, and pastiche. Some films and shows, like NBC’s Community, engage in the same sorts of postmodern, metafictional writing that is one of the most obvious characteristics of fan fiction. Many film and television show creators are engaging more with fan communities, and the way that fans "write back" to their favorite shows is beginning to have an effect on how those shows are written. Televisions series like Lost and Avatar: The Last Airbender have included material inspired by fans’ reactions to the shows. Conventions like ComicCon, where fans interact with the creators, writers and actors of films and television shows, are becoming increasingly popular and are having a greater and greater impact on the entertainment industry. Tickets for ComicCon 2012 itself sold out in under an hour (Pantozzi).
Fan fiction is an important part of our current popular culture and our culture’s production of texts. To ignore it in favor of a small group of texts which suits the tastes of the traditional academy is frankly silly, not to mention contradictory to the supposed values of many academics. Movements in literary scholarship in the last couple decades have begun to “rediscover” writers who were popular in their own time but ignored by the traditional academy. Many of these writers have been women, writers who were popular among the people but not among the scholars, or participants in genres that were long looked down on, such as gothic or sentimental literature. It is strange that so many literary scholars today are offended if such works are disdained for their authors, styles, or genre, and yet completely ignore fan fiction, the sentimental literature of contemporary society.
A final reason for the literary academy to study fan fiction is an economic one. English departments in universities are threatening to go the way of philosophy departments: a degree in English literature is increasingly seen as unhelpful in getting a job, and many people have begun to express the belief that the only thing you can do with a major in literature is teach literature. But if the literary academy began to engage more with popular culture and popular literature, it could forge a stronger connection with the booming entertainment industry and increase the culture's belief in the marketability of a degree in English literature. Literary scholars would no longer be seen as studying only a tiny portion of our culture's literature, a portion which in some cases is hardly read by the rest of the culture. The study of literature might then be seen as more relevant-and more appealing to students. Some of them, we must remember, enjoy Twilight and fan fiction more than Eliot and Joyce. Somewhat paradoxically, by studying literature like fan fiction that is not written for money, the academy might also help to remind our culture that literature is worth studying for itself alone, and not necessarily for money, power or prestige. In reinforcing this message, the literary academy could bolster its own position in education.
When the literary academy concentrates only on a small portion of texts and accords less prestige to the study of popular literature, it not only ignores a large portion of the culture it purports to study, but also reinforces a hierarchy of literature that both shores up its position as the arbiter of literary taste and ensures that some voices are silenced or accorded less prestige in the general culture. By doing so, it cuts off its nose to spite its face: disdaining popular literature genres such as fan fiction greatly limits the academy's engagement with the larger literary culture and reinforces the reputation of literary studies as esoteric and useless. In enforcing its dictates on “high” literature versus “popular” literature, the academy is trying to reinforce its own power in the culture, but in the long run, such an attitude toward popular literature could make the literary academy so esoteric as to be nearly obsolete. By embracing this democratic genre, literary studies might have to lower itself from its strict ideals of originality and "literary" style, but it could also make itself more appealing and halt the degeneration of its perceived marketability.
Works Cited
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. Print.
Brewer, David A. The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Print.
Curtin, Mary Ellen. "Statistics." Alternate Universes: Fan Fiction Studies. Curtin, 17 March 2003. Web. 26 May 2012. .
"FanFiction.net Story Totals." Fan Fiction Statistics: FFN Research. FFN Research, 6 July 2010. Web. 26 May 2012. .
"FAQ about Fan Fiction." Chilling Effects. Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, n.d. Web. 26 May 2012. .
Grossman, Lev. "Stephenie Meyer: A New J. K. Rowling?" Time Magazine. Time, 24 April 2008. Web. 1 June 2012.
Hellekson, Karen, ed. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Print.
Hurman, James. "We Are Not Here To Do What Has Already Been Done." Idealog. Idealog, 15 Jan. 2007. Web. 1 June 2012. .
Knobloch, Victoria. "Fifty Shades of Fan Fiction: Writers and Friends." The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, 19 April 2012. Web. 1 June 2012. .
Lemley, Mark A. "Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding." Texas Law Review 83.4 (March 2005): 1031-75. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 May 2012. .
Macfarlane, Robert. Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Mazzeo, Tilar J. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. Print.
Minzesheimer, Bob and Anthony DeBarros. "Sellers Basked in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight in 2008." USA Today. Gannett, 16 January 2009. Web. 30 May 2012. .
Pantozzi, Jill. "San Diego Comic-Con Tickets Sell Out in the Time It Takes To Watch an Episode of Doctor Who." The Mary Sue: A Guide to Girl Geek Culture. TheMarySue, LLC, 4 March 2012. Web. 1 June 2012. .
Pinkowitz, Jacqueline M. "'The rabid fans that take [Twilight] much too seriously': The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom." Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011). Web. 30 May 2012. .
Posner, Richard A. The Little Book of Plagiarism. New York: Pantheon, 2007. Print.
Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005. Print.
Fan Fiction and Power in the Literary Academy
Fan fiction is a genre of literature that metafictionally examines how readers receive and respond to literature, film, and television shows. This genre of literature is often spread through new media and arises out of international communities that form around the appreciation of particular texts. Much of the production and reception of this fan fiction is in the hands of women and is not under the control of outside publishers, thus allowing participants to more freely express themselves to one another. Works in this genre often comment on topics such as gender and queer sexuality. What is perhaps most astounding is the amount of work in this genre available for study: statisticians estimate that the number of works of fan fiction available online may have been as high as 50,000 to one million in the year 2000 (Curtin). It has grown significantly since. Yet despite the treasure trove of material this genre presents to the study of literature, very little work on it has come out of the academic community, and most of it has come from sociologists rather than literature scholars.
Fan fiction is literature that has been written by a fan of a particular film, television series, or novel, using the characters and settings of the original work. Contemporary fan fiction as it is generally defined was first circulated in hardcopy Star Trek fanzines in the Trekker fan communities of the sixties, seventies and eighties,* and is now even more broadly circulated (in many more fandoms than Star Trek) via the internet. As of June 25, 2010, the largest online compendium of fan fiction, Fanfiction.net, was hosting 3,256,278 publicly accessible pieces of fan fiction ("FanFiction.net Story Totals"). The total amount of fan fiction that has been produced is unknowable.
[*See the second edition of Joan Marie Verba's Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987 (Minnetonka: FTL, 2003) for an extensive discussion. (Available online at ).]
Fan fiction has been generally ignored as literature by the academy; most of the scholarly attention to this genre has come from the fields of sociology, media studies, women’s studies, and anthropology. Scholars in these fields have focused much more on the fans themselves and their communities than on the work they have produced. But the fan fiction texts themselves constitute a rich field of study for literary scholars. So why have they studied them so little? Though there are a number of reasons why fan fiction has been so neglected by scholars, most of these come down to a question of power and prestige. Fan fiction is ignored by the literary academy because this genre is democratic and derivative in nature: two characteristics that mark it in the minds of scholars as being of little prestige. However, by ignoring fan fiction and popular genres like it, the literary academy is reinforcing a hegemonic hierarchy of literature in which texts which are considered more "original," or written in certain styles, are disseminated and lauded while others are silenced. It is also failing to study a huge portion of the textual works of contemporary society.
Practical and Legal Deterrents
One of the reasons why so little scholarly work on fan fiction has been done by the literary academy is that there is too much of it to know where to start or how to form a comprehensive idea of the whole. It is a sad paradox that as this body of work has expanded until the number of texts is in the multiple millions, the size of the body of work has looked increasingly unmanageable in terms of scholarly analysis. The amount of available material is simply overwhelming. Even the very few scholars who have attempted some literary analysis of fan fiction have had to limit themselves to very small segments of the genre as a whole. Sheenagh Pugh, in The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, confines her studies to five fandoms in which she has read extensively: Jane Austen, Discworld, Blakes 7, The Bill, and Horatio Hornblower. As Pugh observes, “I am not claiming an exhaustive knowledge of fan fiction in print and online. Nobody could; the quantities of material involved render it impossible. . . . My experience as a reader is partial; in some ways it may be typical in others not. One has to start somewhere” (7). However, it is worth pointing out that the very fact that there is so much unexamined material available should spur scholars to, like Pugh, start somewhere.
A second problem of practicality in the study of fan fiction is its transience. The 3.2 million publicly accessible works on Fanfiction.net mentioned earlier are only a little over half of the total number of works the website has tracked: 46%-47% of the website’s content consists of deleted stories. The statisticians at FFN Research observe that “nearly half of all stories posted [on Fanfiction.net] will sooner or later disappear” ("FanFiction.net Story Totals"). Why write a study on a work that may not even exist publicly by the time your article has been published?
But the transience of fan fiction as a genre is partly tied to the vexed question of its legality: fan works would likely have more permanence if they had more protection under the law. As of January 1, 2012, works written before 1923 are legally in the public domain, and fan fiction writers may do with them as they please and even officially publish their fan fiction without fear of legal reprisal: witness the number of sequels to Jane Austen’s novels that have been published recently**, or the proliferating adaptations and extensions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories***. However, a great deal of contemporary online fan fiction, if not most, is written from more recent works, including film and television series. The fan fiction for this may be published solely online or even in fanzines, but the publication of such fan fiction is legally questionable. Chilling Effects, “a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics,” is a website devoted to explaining First Amendment rights as they pertain to online activities. On the page “FAQ about Fan Fiction,” Chilling Effects explains,
If a Fan Fiction author uses copyrighted elements in someone else's work in his/her story, then the fan fiction may be a derivative work. There are many elements of a work that an author can borrow. The law, however, does not clearly define whether fictitious characters, worlds, histories and names are copyright protected. . . . The prevailing rule seems to be that a character is copyrightable separate from the original work if the character is "distinctly delineated." Authors can have a separate copyright protection for the characters in their works only if they have been developed and constitute original expression. Generic characters (the sidekick, for example) are not protected. Some courts require this delineation to be quite extensive, to the point that the character "constitutes the story being told." (“FAQ about Fan Fiction”)
[**See the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series by Quirk Books, Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James, or the ITV miniseries Lost in Austen, among others.]
[***These include the BBC television series Sherlock, the upcoming series Elementary on CBS, the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series by Titan Books, and the Professor Moriarty novels by Kim Newman.]
Fan fiction writers themselves almost always freely admit that they are working within the “canon” of another author’s creation, and they usually borrow much more than generic characters. But this does not necessarily mean that the fan fiction writer would not legally be able to create this fan fiction: fan fiction might be allowed under the “fair use” exception. Chilling Effects explains:
The fair use doctrine says that otherwise copyrighted works may be used for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. To decide whether a use is "fair use" or not, courts consider:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Parody is also fair use.
Under this doctrine, artists have been permitted to create and display their art even if it uses copyrighted works of others. . . . Whether a court will view this as the case for a particular work of fan fiction depends on how much of the story relies on copyrighted materials, whether the story is sold, or affects the market for the copyrighted work, and other factors. (“FAQ about Fan Fiction”)
Some therefore would argue that fan fiction is an infringement of copyright, while other would argue that it falls under “fair use.” In any case, its questionable legality adds to fan fiction's reputation as a less legitimate literary form and consequently may make it seem less worthy of study.
However, fan fiction could and should be considered fair use on two grounds: it neither harms the "original" creator financially nor impinges upon that creator's intellectual rights more than other acts of interpretation, such as scholarship, do. Copyright law is in place for two reasons: to protect the creator of the work financially by barring any unauthorized person from profiting from the work, and to protect the creator’s intellectual property. On the first count, it could be argued that fan fiction not only does not endanger the author’s profits, but actually increases them. ChillingEffects points out, “In order for a corporation to win a cease-and-desist order against a FanFic author, it would have to prove that it was suffering financial damage, something that is hard to prove since much of FanFic actually helps boost sales” ("FAQ about Fan Fiction"). Reading fan fiction does not give the audience the same experience as reading or watching the source text: reading a fic about the romance between Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks, be it ever so many chapters long, is not a replacement for reading the Harry Potter series itself. Fan fiction amplifies the ways one can understand the source text-and adds to the number of adventures had by characters of that text-but it does not seek to replace the source text or impinge on its primacy. In fact, experiencing the source text is often necessary to understand the fan fiction in the first place. Thus fan fiction can in fact increase the sales of the source texts by building hype for them. I can state from my own experience that there are a number of books, television shows and films that I would never have read or watched if I had not encountered fan fiction and other fan activities related to those sources: I wanted to see the show so that I could understand the fan fiction.
Fan fiction also does not impinge on the original authors' rights to their intellectual property. Intellectual property rights are based on the idea that the creator of the work has ownership of that work and the exclusive right to it: the right to decide what happens to his or her characters and to the fictional world that he or she has created. However, it is not actually possible to have exclusive rights to one's work. Every reader will interpret the text as he or she sees fit; every reader is free to imagine alternative endings, new characters, and new interactions between existing characters. In fact scholars, through the fair use doctrine, are allowed to completely reinterpret works and to change many people’s perceptions of those works. It is quite likely, for instance, that Jane Austen would be very surprised to discover that Mansfield Park is now often seen as a discussion of slavery: this is a result of scholarly reinterpretation. Once a work is in the hands of the public, the amount of control that the author can exert over that work is indeed quite limited. And as far as the copyright laws themselves work in terms of intellectual property, Mark A. Lemley notes that “Intellectual property rights . . . are granted only when-and only to the extent that-they are necessary to encourage invention” (1031). This is why copyrights are so limited and why works can eventually come into the public domain. Lemley concludes, “On this view, the proper goal of intellectual property law is to give as little protection as possible consistent with encouraging innovation” (1031). Since fan fiction writers conventionally put disclaimers at the top of their chapters indicating that they do not own the rights to the characters, and since they almost always indicate quite clearly that they are playing in someone else’s sandbox, fan fiction should not be seen as a threat, either to the finances or the ultimate intellectual property of the source author. Fan fiction is simply innovation that is inspired by the work of another author.
The Issue of Originality
The question of fan fiction’s legality is only one small part of a much larger deterrent to its prestige and study in the academy: the biggest problem with fan fiction, as seen by literary scholars, is its lack of originality. In order to qualify as a piece of fan fiction, the work in question must be derivative. It cannot follow its source material word-for-word, but it also must have a substantial and noticeable link to a piece of “original” fiction. Originality in art is greatly prized in the academy, so this kind of derivative work is not much valued. However, the judgment that original literature is better literature is not universal, but a social construct. In fact, the closer we examine the perceived dichotomy between original and derivative work, the more artificial the distinction seems. Through its emphasis on "originality" and its own judgments on what constitutes a "good" writing style the academy, rather than studying the actual literature of the general culture, silences many of its voices. The academy needs to recognize the power it has over the literary judgments of the culture and reexamine the power structures it is reinforcing.
The emphasis the academy, and thus our contemporary culture, places on originality is not universal in the appreciation of literature. On the contrary, it is a relatively recent phenomenon in western culture. Even today, though the emphasis on originality is part of the ideology of contemporary literary criticism and thus guides scholars in their judgment of what counts as Literature, it does not hold uncontested sway in our society. Originality has not always been considered desirable. The revered and oft-studied Chaucer, like many other medieval authors, does not seem to have been at all worried that he was borrowing material wholesale from other writers. As Pugh points out, there is even "a mediaeval convention of authorial modesty whereby writers routinely claim that they found the story they are about to tell us in some ancient book” (13). Works that were derivative in nature were considered to have better authority, and therefore higher prestige, than original works. This attitude was not limited to the medieval period: Shakespeare drew material from Plutarch, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and more, and, as David A. Brewer extensively demonstrates in The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825, the long eighteenth century was a time of prolific creation of derivative works, many of which strongly resemble contemporary fan fiction. Some scholars pinpoint the Romantic period as the time in which creative originality was first held up as the ideal in art and literature, but some scholars are beginning to question this statement: Tilar J. Mazzeo demonstrates in her book Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period that Romantic conceptions of plagiarism were not as strict as our current ones. Even after the Romantic period originality was not necessarily the ideal for artistic work: in Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature Robert Macfarlane argues that “from the late 1850s onwards, unoriginality-understood as the inventive reuse of the words of others-came increasingly to be discerned as an authentic form of creativity” (8). It is only in the last two or three hundred years that our culture has begun to put so much emphasis on originality, and that emphasis seems to have grown rapidly in the twentieth century.
Our culture's recent obsession with artistic originality is curious, especially given the artificiality of the concept. The more one studies fan fiction, the more blurred the lines between derivative fiction and original fiction appear. A story about Kirk and Spock published in a fanzine is fan fiction, but a novel by the same author, published with the blessing of the franchise, might be considered part of the “canon” of Star Trek and as legitimate and “original” as the rest of the communally-created franchise. The novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies could clearly be considered fan fiction, but then what about the great Henry Fielding’s “Shamela”, a satire on Samuel Richardson’s 1741 novel Pamela? It uses the same characters, settings and events as Richardson’s original novel, like Zombies does with Austen's. Is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King fan fiction based on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, or is it a legitimate artistic work because it is derived from a shared "myth kitty" rather than a single author's work? Looking backward through the history of literature, all of these works could be called fan fiction by today’s standards. In fact, all literature could be considered derivative in some degree: every author borrows, more or less, from the authors who have gone before him or her, taking characters (though often changing the names), situations, tropes, settings, and plot points from the literature that s/he has read. Even the works that seem the most startlingly original, such as James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses, or Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" borrow material from earlier authors-in fact, Richard A. Posner describes "The Waste Land" as "a tissue of quotations (without quotation marks) from earlier literature" (55). There is no clear place to draw the line between originality and derivation; our contemporary idea that some works are acceptably original and others are not is a social construct that is reinforced by the literary academy itself, which will only study those works which it considers "original."
The actual taste of the public is often opposed to the tastes of the academy. The culture as a whole does not necessarily prize originality so strictly as the academy does: despite the emphasis so often put on originality in art in contemporary society, there is still a thirst for more of the same old thing. The very existence of fan fiction itself testifies to this thirst. James Hurman also reminds us of the public's taste for the derivative in film:
Forty films from history have grossed over $500 million globally. Twenty-six are adaptations from popular books or comics (such as Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man), sequels to previously successful franchises (Star Wars, The Matrix) or adaptations of historical stories (Titanic, The Passion of the Christ), rendering them unoriginal from conception. The remaining 14 big hitters-such as Independence Day, Ghost and Armageddon-all follow the formulaic three-act linear structure that Hollywood demands.
The literary academy has a tendency to divide itself from the popular culture, and instead of studying the works that are most popular and most widely disseminated and thus have the greatest impact on contemporary culture, it studies only those works it deems, by its own criteria, to be worthy. It therefore divorces itself from the objects it purports to study: the literary productions of our culture.
Power and the Academy
This does not mean that the literary academy, sitting divorced from the world in its ivory tower, has no impact on general society. On the contrary, its dictates and standards for what makes good or bad literature are listened to and disseminated beyond academia, and produce a culture of individuals that disdain their own favorite art and literature as trashy, or attempt (like the stereotypical hipster) to define themselves in opposition to the culture at large. An example of this sort of cultural multiple personality disorder can be seen in the reception of Twilight. The Twilight novels have been undeniably popular: "Stephenie Meyer sold more books in 2008 than any other author (22 million, according to her publisher) and did what no else-not even J.K. Rowling-has done in the 15 years of USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list: She swept the four top slots in 2008's best sellers with her Twilight series" (Minzesheimer and DeBarros). That's not even mentioning the popularity of the films based on these books. Yet Twilight has experienced a severe backlash from the culture and is often excoriated as terrible writing. Jacqueline M. Pinkowitz, in her article on the Twilight "antifandom", notes how scholarly discourse has helped to shape the virulent criticisms of these novels:
Fearful of a low ranking on the cultural hierarchy, [Twilight antifans] have created their own internal fan hierarchy that, according to cultural notions about the superiority of class, education, and the elite over the uneducated and the popular, as well as of the dismissability of girl culture, ensures the dominance and safety of their own affected rationality over the characterized emotional and excessive behavior of rabid Twilight fans and antifans. Part of the performance of such scholarly affectation involves appropriating discourses of academia into their literary criticism of Twilight, so as to overcome any negative connotations of excess or susceptibility to the mass media. (Pinkowitz, emphasis mine)
The general culture has picked up on the way that scholarly discourse hierarchizes "high" literature over "popular" literature and uses this hierarchy to disdain the most popular of its contemporary literary works.
The academy holds great power in legitimating some genres and styles of literature in the eyes of the culture and denigrating others. Through its selection of texts that are worthy of study, it ensures that only works that meet its standards will be seen as “Literature.” Those works which it does not judge as making the cut, though they may be greatly enjoyed by the larger society-perhaps more enjoyed than many of what are considered "great works of Literature"-are still viewed as inferior efforts. The wider culture, vaguely aware of the roster of what the literary academy considers great works, then sometimes disdains its own literary output, regardless of the actual merit of that output. It then reinforces the literary academy's position as the arbiter of taste, since scholars are those who read, enjoy, and study works that may be seen by the general public as more meritorious, but less enjoyable or accessible. By studying some works and ignoring others, the literary academy is reinforcing its own power in the culture, in our literature, and in our language. What counts as "Literature" is a question, not of the dictionary definition of the word, but of power. Because the academy defines what is "original" and values more highly the literature that is so defined, the culture ensures that "original" works are offered legal protection that derivative works are not afforded. Because the authors of derivative works are denied legal protection, they are also denied the economic incentives of traditional publishing and cultural support for their labor.
We can see clearly that the academy's categorization of original works as more legitimate and worthy of study than derivative works is a question of power when we examine the special case of satire and parody. As noted above in the discussion of legality, “Parody is also fair use” ("FAQ about Fan Fiction"). Why is parody, which borrows ideas from existing works in order to mock them, considered fair use while fan fiction, which borrows ideas from existing works in order to celebrate and extend them, is considered legally gray? If the academy studies (and praises) satires like Fielding’s Shamela, why doesn't it study and praise fan fiction? The answer lies in the power dynamics involved in parody and fan fiction. When a satirist parodies the work of another author, the satirist places him/herself above that author: by mocking the author’s work, the satirist is putting the author down. However, when a fan composes a piece of fan fiction, the fan is seen as subordinating him/herself to the other author. Thus the “original” author is upheld as an originating genius, while the fan is seen as a mere dabbler in someone else’s masterpiece. Parody has an illusion of power over the original work that fan fiction does not; parody is thus accorded more prestige by the academy, which influences the general public through its own power and prestige. The culture thus concludes that parody should be protected by law as "fair use," while fan fiction, which has not been so favored by the literary gods, is relegated to a gray area of insecure legality. That which the academy defines as "parody" rather than "derivative literature" is defined by law as "fair use" rather than "copyright infringement." Both the academy and the law use language to exert power over authors and decide which works will be lauded and protected and which will be denigrated and attacked.
Fan fiction is opposed to this power structure by its very nature. It is, as Pugh points out, a “democratic genre”. By altering and/or adding to an existing work, the fan writer may actually be seen as putting him/herself on the same level as the original author. In a sense, the fan writer is claiming the authority to alter the original work and is thus putting him/herself on the level of the original writer. Authors who write fan fiction based on the works of great authors such as Jane Austen could be seen as positioning themselves on a level playing field with Austen: they are claiming the authority to alter Austen's writing, and the authority to write and to have their peers read their work, just as Austen did. Likewise, fan fiction writers can be seen as being on the same level with one another. Each fan text presents an alternative version of the source material, and none of those alternative versions is subordinated to another-they all have equal legitimacy and are equally "possible." Thus the authors of fan fiction create a huge, democratic writing community in which they are all on the same level, and in a sense see themselves as being on the same level as more "legitimately" published authors. In this way, fan culture can be seen as ignoring and opposing the dictates of the literary academy to a greater degree than the general culture-which, basing its judgments and behavior on the behavior of the academy, either remains ignorant of the existence of fan culture or views it as alien or aberrant. Members of fan culture are "weird," a way for the culture to use language to marginalize and separate themselves from those who might, with more prestige, threaten the power of the copyright law or the literary academy's dictates.
Fan fiction is democratic in other ways than simply in terms of how fan fiction writers position themselves in relation to the original text. Partly because of its lack of legal protection, fan fiction also avoids the shibboleth of traditional publishing. Anyone with a word processor and internet access can publish fan fiction. Unlike “traditionally” published fiction, fan fiction can go public without the censorship, selection, and control of an editor, proofreader, or publishing company. If fan fiction is proofread, the proofreader, called a "beta", is a fellow member of the fan community, and by definition, a peer rather than an authority figure. Some scholars feel that because it avoids the "quality control" of professional editors and proofreaders, fan fiction must be of low literary merit: someone who has been indoctrinated with the academy's concepts of good versus bad literature is needed to weed out the bad literature and keep it from being published.
But by not studying works that are published outside of the traditional process, the academy is reinforcing the authority of the traditional press as the bestower of artistic merit, which decides which pieces will or will not be published, and which voices will or will not be heard. The press is capable of silencing those writers whose work does not fit its concept of high art. It also rewards those who do by helping them to earn money from their writing, something that fan fiction writers cannot do for fear of the copyright laws. By publishing online, then, the fan community ignores the power of the academy, the law, the press, and the dollar to censor artistic expression. In this economy of art, the publishers make no money and the public can enjoy fan fiction for free. The academy, by ignoring and thus refusing to bestow its blessing upon non-traditionally published genres, reinforces a system of economic gain for traditional publishing and a system where artistic merit is confirmed by sales-which is odd, since (as we have already noted) many of the kinds of works that are supported by the academy do not sell as well as more "popular" genres. Again, this creates a strange schizophrenia in our culture, in which we simultaneously laud works that make money and denigrate works that make too much money: we love "low" art and denigrate it for being low art****.
[****I had a student once who wanted to write a research paper on the question, "Why do we like pop music so much, if it's so bad?" When I asked him why he thought pop music was bad, he couldn't answer: he just kept saying "Because it is!" The academy has insisted that "pop" art is equated with bad art, and the culture has accepted the judgment.]
A third way in which fan fiction is "democratic" is in its style, which might be considered less “literary” and more “of the people.” The style of prose that is most common in the genre of English-language fan fiction is not one with much prestige in the academy. For instance, in contrast to much contemporary "high" literature, which attempts to eliminate "telling" in favor of "showing", a great deal of fan fiction is not shy about telling the audience exactly what is going on, fully describing characters' emotions and thoughts where contemporary literature in a more "literary" style would leave these things to the inference of the reader. To give an example, the writing style of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is rather similar to a great deal of fan fiction: Lev Grossman wrote in Time Magazine that the books “have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction” (Grossman 2). Try asking a room full of literary scholars what they think of the style of Twilight-just make sure you’ve cleared plenty of time in your schedule for the exercise.
Again, the academy’s support of one style of writing over another is based on arbitrary social constructs of taste that neither necessarily match the tastes of the general reading public nor are questioned by society, since literary scholars are seen as the arbiters of literary merit. They are the ones with the authority to decide how language may or may not be used, and when it is not used to their satisfaction, they make sure that it is labeled "low art." The authors of fan fiction have not complied with the standards set by the academy, have ignored the authority of the academy, and are punished and marginalized in order to bolster the power of the academy. The academy's standards are obviously arbitrary, since what is considered a "literary" style differs depending on when work was written. Well-respected works from the eighteenth and nineteenth century include much more "telling" than twenty- and twenty-first-century literature. Though the literary style of fan fiction does not currently have much prestige in the academy, it cannot be considered objectively worse writing than works which do: judgment of style is a matter of opinion. I don't like many works of high modernism, which is why I leave the study of it to scholars who do. A simple dislike for the style of a work among some individuals is no reason why it should not be studied by others, and there are literary scholars who do read and enjoy fan fiction. They should not be discouraged from doing research on it by implied threats of their work having low prestige in the academy and thus being less likely to help them get a job. The hierarchy of high and low art cannot be much changed by the academy until the academy stops punishing its own scholars who are attempting to make the change.
In sum, when the literary academy deems some genres to be worthy of study and others to be beyond the pale, what it is really reinforcing is its own power in the culture to decide what is good literature and what is not. It attempts to silence those voices that disagree with it through the authority, direct or indirect, which it exerts on literary reputation, the law, and the economic system of traditional publishing. The power of the academy to influence the culture's concepts of high versus low art and acceptable versus unacceptable publishing works to ensure that genres like fan fiction that are carried on without the academy's approval are marginalized and thus silenced. Only some forms of artistic expression, the academy seems to say, only some ways of responding to texts, are artistically and socially acceptable, and we are the people with the authority to separate the sheep from the goats.
Benefits
So much for the reasons why fan fiction should not be ignored or disdained by the academy. But why should the academy spend time trying to carve its way into the thick and endless jungle of online fan fiction? What are the incentives for it to do so?
First of all, the literary academy can find ample play for some of its favorite topics within the genre of fan fiction. One piece of fan fiction that actually is a popular object of study in the literary academy is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a fan prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This piece is popular among academics because it examines themes of racism and colonialism in Brontë’s novel, and is written in a style that the academy appears to approve of. Scholars such as Trevor Hope*^* discuss how Jean Rhys "writes back" to Charlotte Brontë and criticizes the assumptions of the novel. Yet a great deal of contemporary fan fiction could be seen as doing the same thing, in various ways: fan fiction is a "writing back" to the original authors. Its democratic nature also makes it a place where people who would not be capable of making their voices heard in traditional publishing can reshape stories from the mass media into new and personal creations.
[*^*See "Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness," College Literature 39.1 (Winter 2012), 51-73.]
Fan fiction is also a predominantly female genre (Knobloch). It is therefore available as a place to study how women position themselves in relation to texts and how they “write back” to texts. And the fact that “slash” or homoerotic fiction is so popular in fan fiction also makes this genre a fertile field for the study of queer theory. If the academy decided that fan fiction was not a genre below its notice, it would soon discover that fan fiction is a broad and fascinating field for considering many of academia’s pet topics, some of them being discussed in ways that it had not been hitherto encountered or emphasized. The academy might even begin to listen to the messages the fan fiction writers themselves are sending through their work, and discover new themes of literature to concentrate on. Harold Bloom wrote of the anxiety of influence, but the joyful and obvious borrowing from the work of other artists and authors surely deserves at least as much critical attention.
The fact that so many members of the reading public enjoy fan fiction is another reason it should be studied. Fanfiction.net alone had approximately 2.2 million accounts as of 2009 (Knobloch). This is only one fan site; there are many more sites that host fan fiction. Victoria Knobloch writes in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian that the “relatively new” site “Archive of Our Own (AO3) recently passed 40,000 users, who have contributed 332,300 works-including works besides fic-across over 8,800 fandoms, nearly doubling their number of users since September 2011” (Knobloch). Fan fiction is obviously a very popular genre, and as such, it is deserving of study as a genre of contemporary literature.
Not only so, but fan fiction is related to recent postmodern trends the media. Fan fiction engages in metafiction, collaboration, mixtures of high and low culture, and pastiche. Some films and shows, like NBC’s Community, engage in the same sorts of postmodern, metafictional writing that is one of the most obvious characteristics of fan fiction. Many film and television show creators are engaging more with fan communities, and the way that fans "write back" to their favorite shows is beginning to have an effect on how those shows are written. Televisions series like Lost and Avatar: The Last Airbender have included material inspired by fans’ reactions to the shows. Conventions like ComicCon, where fans interact with the creators, writers and actors of films and television shows, are becoming increasingly popular and are having a greater and greater impact on the entertainment industry. Tickets for ComicCon 2012 itself sold out in under an hour (Pantozzi).
Fan fiction is an important part of our current popular culture and our culture’s production of texts. To ignore it in favor of a small group of texts which suits the tastes of the traditional academy is frankly silly, not to mention contradictory to the supposed values of many academics. Movements in literary scholarship in the last couple decades have begun to “rediscover” writers who were popular in their own time but ignored by the traditional academy. Many of these writers have been women, writers who were popular among the people but not among the scholars, or participants in genres that were long looked down on, such as gothic or sentimental literature. It is strange that so many literary scholars today are offended if such works are disdained for their authors, styles, or genre, and yet completely ignore fan fiction, the sentimental literature of contemporary society.
A final reason for the literary academy to study fan fiction is an economic one. English departments in universities are threatening to go the way of philosophy departments: a degree in English literature is increasingly seen as unhelpful in getting a job, and many people have begun to express the belief that the only thing you can do with a major in literature is teach literature. But if the literary academy began to engage more with popular culture and popular literature, it could forge a stronger connection with the booming entertainment industry and increase the culture's belief in the marketability of a degree in English literature. Literary scholars would no longer be seen as studying only a tiny portion of our culture's literature, a portion which in some cases is hardly read by the rest of the culture. The study of literature might then be seen as more relevant-and more appealing to students. Some of them, we must remember, enjoy Twilight and fan fiction more than Eliot and Joyce. Somewhat paradoxically, by studying literature like fan fiction that is not written for money, the academy might also help to remind our culture that literature is worth studying for itself alone, and not necessarily for money, power or prestige. In reinforcing this message, the literary academy could bolster its own position in education.
When the literary academy concentrates only on a small portion of texts and accords less prestige to the study of popular literature, it not only ignores a large portion of the culture it purports to study, but also reinforces a hierarchy of literature that both shores up its position as the arbiter of literary taste and ensures that some voices are silenced or accorded less prestige in the general culture. By doing so, it cuts off its nose to spite its face: disdaining popular literature genres such as fan fiction greatly limits the academy's engagement with the larger literary culture and reinforces the reputation of literary studies as esoteric and useless. In enforcing its dictates on “high” literature versus “popular” literature, the academy is trying to reinforce its own power in the culture, but in the long run, such an attitude toward popular literature could make the literary academy so esoteric as to be nearly obsolete. By embracing this democratic genre, literary studies might have to lower itself from its strict ideals of originality and "literary" style, but it could also make itself more appealing and halt the degeneration of its perceived marketability.
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