The ethics of writing about fic: opinions, please!
I'm contemplating writing an essay on fanfic as intervention in the developing text of canon, with a focus on the emergence of certain kinds of concerns in HP fandom at particular moments in the publication history of Rowling's books. I wonder what you readers - and especially authors - think about the issues around citing, quoting from, and writing criticism of fic. Rather than writing in a general way about what the fandom does, I'd like to look closely at a small number of seminal fics (and a few of my favorites), but of course even the best-known, best-archived fics are anonymous/pseudonymous, liable to be taken down at any moment, and their publication is subject to all kinds of legal constraints. My inclination when writing about fic would be in some ways to treat texts the way I would any others, providing enough summary and context that someone who hadn't read the fic in question could appreciate the point I was making, and quoting short passages that I want to discuss in detail. On the other hand, scruples of the anonymosphere suggest that the polite and prudent thing to do would be to obtain permission from the authors concerned before writing about their work, find out how they prefer to be cited, whether they'd prefer their work not be quoted in print, etc. I'd be very happy to have people's thoughts on this, as well as pointers to other discussions of this problem or models for how other critics have handled it.
(Cross-posted at Practica)
(Cross-posted at Practica)