The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction |
| Commentator: | Stephanie Burt |
| Date(s): | August 23, 2017 |
| Venue: | article |
| Fandom: | Pan-fandom |
| External Links: | The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction is a 2017 article written by Stephanie Burt for The New Yorker's section on books. This positive explanation and exploration of fanfiction touches upon slash, AO3, acafen Francesca Coppa and Anne Jamison, the books The Fanfiction Reader and Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, the fic Lunch and Other Obscenities, The Rec Center.
Excerpts
First there was “Star Trek,” the original series, whose viewers—many of them women in stem fields—organized conventions and created self-published journals (a.k.a. fanzines) with fiction about its characters, a small but notorious slice of which included sexy doings between Kirk and Spock. Or: first there were fans of science-fiction novels and magazines who held conventions and traded self-published journals as early as the nineteen-thirties. Or: first there was Sherlock Holmes, whose devotees, hooked by serial publication, pushed for more stories, formed clubs, and wrote their own. Or: first came Virgil’s Aeneid. Or: first, the Janeites. Or: first there was you, and your friends, age ten, making up adventures in which Chewbacca met Addy Walker, and writing them down.
It’s true that a lot of fanfic is sexy, and that much of the sex is kinky, or taboo, or queer. But lots of fanfic has no more sex than the latest “Spider-Man” film (which is to say none at all, more or less). Moreover, as that shy proto-fan T. S. Eliot once put it, “nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else.” It’s a mistake to see fanfic only as faute de mieux, a second choice, a replacement. Fanfic can, of course, pay homage to source texts, and let us imagine more life in their worlds; it can be like going back to a restaurant you loved, or like learning to cook that restaurant’s food. It can also be a way to critique sources, as when race-bending writers show what might change if Agent Scully were black. (Coppa has compared the writing of fanfic to the restaging of Shakespeare’s plays.)