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Nele Noppe

Reading Harry Potter: A personal and collective experience - 0 views

  • reception of the Harry Potter novels in France.
  • “media talk” has shaped an image of the Harry Potter readership and ascribed meanings to the novels.
  • Harry Potter readership seems to be very diverse, blurring some traditional age, gender or social distinctions related to reading preferences.
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  • Our research interest was to investigate how these very heterogeneous readers made sense of the books and organized their Harry Potter “reading career.”
  • We have tried to avoid the intellectualist bias of the academic discourse privileging the most analytic and erudite forms of reception, or the most articulate and literary forms of newspaper reviews (Barker, 2004). As Elizabeth Long pointed out, “the traditional imagery of the solitary reader” has privileged “a certain kind of reading: erudite, analytic” (Long, 2003, p. 2-3), and it “legitimat[es] only certain kinds of literary values and certain modes of reading” (p. 11).
  • The Harry Potter books are characterized by their serial publication over ten years, their dispersion on different media and tie-ins, and their symbolic status as best-sellers and objects of public attention: all these elements have shaped reading experiences.
  • Martin Barker emphasized the importance of the secondary, ancillary, or satellite texts that shape in advance the conditions under which interpretations of novels are formed: marketing campaigns, articles, reviews and debates in the media, and fan productions (Barker, 2004).
  • All these public discourses constitute discursive frames around the novels. They tend to ascribe meanings and effects to the Harry Potter books and to spread a homogeneous and sometimes simplistic image of Harry Potter readers.
  • Although the Harry Potter readership is much wider, the readers who were mostly described were teenagers. Assumptions about teenagers’ emotional instability, vulnerability, and identity crises have influenced many of the categories used in media discourse to talk about Harry Potter.
  • Reading Harry Potter was supposed to contribute to the harmonious maturation of the readers, as the characters themselves were growing up. The mechanism of this readers’ transformation was supposed to be “identification”:
  • layed an important role in turning Harry Potter into a part of legitimate and safe culture.
  • These ancillary discourses targeting teenagers were thus clearly gendered, and the labels applied to the movies and the novels can help to define a diversity of reading expectations. But do actual readers conform to these solicitations? How do they appropriate the novels? How do their reading experiences relate to their movie experiences with Harry Potter?
  • The Harry Potter novels, by their wide and diverse readership, lent themselves very well to an investigation of the diversity of “appropriation” and levels of engagement.
  • Cultures of feelings and ethical perceptions: 2.a: a preference for adult or “bad” characters: the appeal of psychological complexity
Nele Noppe

Dr. Robin Anne Reid - What do you mean pleasure, white man? abstract - 0 views

  • all fan created productions rely to different degrees upon some form of self-insertion.
  • However, empathetic identification and self-insertion are complicated when the fans being considered are not positioned as privileged within the dominant system of race.
Nele Noppe

esorlehcar: laurashapiro has an interesting post on - 0 views

  • A friend recently commented that she sometimes misses the days when fandom seemed like this shiny, egalitarian place where issues surrounding race (and gender, to a lesser extent) just didn't exist and she didn't realize it was an illusion courtesy of her own privilege, and it struck me how telling a comment that was: For a whole lot of people, the anger that their fandoms are being "polluted" or "ruined" by this kind of discussion stems from a deep-seated conviction that these problems didn't exist in fandom before some troublemakers started talking about them, and they view the people talking about them as the instigators of the problems rather the people who have been hurt by them or seen others hurt by them speaking up to say, "This is wrong, and it's something fandom collectively needs to work on."
Nele Noppe

melannen: So, a long, long time ago, before I had - 0 views

  • Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.
  • I am not, I want to note here, upset at the author of the paper, or its existence, or the fact that he chose to publish in the venue he did. I am *deeply* upset at the system in which venues of choice for academic work lock away professionals' discussions while amateurs can actually have the free and unfettered forum for sharing thought that academics of a hundred years ago could only have dreamed of, and academics of the modern world are expected to choose not to participate in.
  • What bothers me, I guess, is when that locked professional world doesn't stay immured behind its walls. Someone who has probably spent his entire adult life in an academic world, where everybody has institutional support that lets them access things like ridiculously expensive subscription journals, is coming in to *my* world, where everybody works for nothing and publishes for the joy of sharing freely, and dragging our work back behind the wall with him, where we can't touch it anymore.
Nele Noppe

sparkindarkness: More on the M/M genre (because I'm not above flogging a dead horse :P) - 0 views

  • A straight woman is using a male pseudonym to seem more authentic writing about gay men. Why is this not seen as wrong? Why is this not seen as a gross appropriation?
  • However - for a straight woman to summarise coming to terms with homophobia, your sexuality and the closet as “not having the balls to be happy.” Really, no. Seriously no. There is so much ignorant privilege there I can’t even begin to address it. Sorry if depiction of the reality of homophobia spoiled your Happily Ever After.
  • But not gay male experiences - but some of these authors feel free to claim they have and appropriate at will.
Nele Noppe

The Poetics of the Open Work By Umberto Eco - 0 views

  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
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  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece, w
  • the new musical works referred to above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements.
  • initiative of the individual performer
  • As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective. In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.
  • A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.
  • it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a far more tangible sense.
  • the poetics of the "open" work tends to encourage “acts of conscious freedom” on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations,
  • Instead nowadays it is primarily the artist who is aware of its implications.
  • However, in this type of operation, "openness" is far removed from meaning "indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions,
  • and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author.
  • It is not that the four solutions of the allegorical passage are quantitatively more limited than the many possible solutions of a contemporary "open" work. As I shall try to show, it is a different vision of the world which lies under these different aesthetic experiences
  • Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part.
  • the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.
  • W. Y. Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest modern literary works in order to test Valéry's declaration that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte" ("there is no true meaning of a text"). Tindall eventually concludes that a work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a continuous potentiality of "openness"-in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings. This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of modern work on "types of ambiguity" offered by poetic discourse.
  • Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an "open" mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world.
  • Here the work is "open" in the same sense that a debate is "open." A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the "openness" is converted into an instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.
  • the examples considered in the preceding section propose an "openness" based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance.
  • it is clear that a composition such as Scambi poses a completely new problem. It invites us to identify inside the category of "open" works a further, more restricted classification of works which can be defined as "works in movement," because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units
  • If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a work in movement," we are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarmé's Livre, a colossal and far- reaching work, the quintessence of the poet's production. He conceived it as the work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the world:
  • However, Mallarmé's immense enterprise was utopian:
  • In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.
  • Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the "open" work – and even less so in the "work in movement” – more or less specific overtones of trends in contemporary scientific thought.
  • The notion of "possibility" is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order, and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.
  • The two-value truth logic which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.
  • Here are no privileged points of view, and all available perspectives are equally valid and rich in potential.
  • This is not the place to pass judgment on the scientific validity of the metaphysical construct implied by Einstein's system. But there is a striking analogy between his universe and the universe of the work in movement
  • Therefore, to sum up, we can say that the "work in movement" is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author.
  • All these examples of "open" works and "works in movement" have this latent characteristic, which guarantees that they will al- ways be seen as "works" and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.
  • Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thou- sands of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work." The "openness" and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it
  • We have, therefore, seen that (1) "open" works, insofar as they are in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (2) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species "work in movement") there exist works which, though organically completed, are "open" to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range
  • of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance
  • The poetic theory or practice of the "work in movement" senses this possibility as a specific vocation. It allies itself openly and selfconsciously to current trends in scientific method and puts into action and tangible form the very trend which aesthetics has
  • already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer.
  • The poetics of the "work in movement" (and partly that of the "open" work) sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.
Nele Noppe

Abstracts - 0 views

  • Different periods of literary and philosophical thought place emphasis more strongly on either continuity or originality, and thinkers of modernity often privileged originality and artistic genius as they laid the groundwork for a value system that still affects the landscape of contemporary popular culture.
  • Countering this ascribed modernist valuation of originality, postmodern theorists and artists have emphasized pastiche, appropriation, and intertextuality.
  • copyright laws and marketplace expectations have helped establish aesthetic discourses within fan communities that often mirror modernist emphases on originality and authenticity.
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  • despite a cultural value placed on repetition, fandom still remains at least tenuously invested in more traditional notions of originality and uniqueness.
  • In contrast to Eliot's model of artistic genius, emphasizing originality and ownership of individual creativity, I’d like to foreground the fan community as a collective creative culture that values sharing, allusion, and repetition as aesthetic (and affective) choices.
  • Rhetoric is basically a pedagogical discipline comprising a number of pedagogical principles, where one is the principle of imitatio. According to the imitatio principle you have to, very actively, collect an arsenal of different strategies in the process of learning how to write and present a material.
  • With focus on imitatio and from perspectives such as genre, intertextuality, narratology, semiotics, we discuss the creation process of fan fiction in general and slash in particular.  
  • Further, and crucially, fic is a form of discourse that does not just analyse canon – it has the power to add to and change it as fanon and canon mix, encouraging ongoing reinterpretation and reframing of canon within the fanon/canon ‘verse as a whole.
  • Reading and writing fic remains a more popular online activity than taking part in meta discussion, but are the two activities so very different?
  • Harry Potter
  • from a close reading of a set of French potterfictions, my presentation will try to identify and compare the typical “scripts” used by the authors:
  • However, the various academic accounts written about yaoi have a tendency to pathologize yaoi as well as its female fans in terms of gender displacement, female sexual oppression, or sexual starvation.
  • how Queer Theory can assist the academic discussion of yaoi and slash, and counter the tendency to pathologize.
  • The British television show Torchwood has generated a vast amount of fan fiction. Among these stories are some which involve human-animal transformations.
  •   In this paper I intend to study how the human-animal transformations are described in a selected number of fanfic texts.
  • Can these stories be read as a comment on the relation between human and animal, or should the animal in this context rather be read as merely a symbol or a plot device?
  • Ludology, the academic study of games, has maintained a critical distinction that, fundamentally, a game cannot contain a narrative, as its focus is more oriented toward necessarily non-narrative interaction between the game and its players.  Fan fiction seems capable of exploding, or at least complicating, this claim, as the process of a writer’s active and creative engagement with a previously existing storyworld, expressed through fan fiction, appears clearly to meet the requirements both for a game,
  • close readings
  • In existing studies on fan fiction, it has been established that the majority of previous studies have been ethnographical or social in nature. Only very recently have studies on the literary aspects of fan fiction begun to emerge.
  • Harry Potter
  • helps us shorten the gap between literary practices of 'high' and 'low'.
  • Fan Fiction – ‘The Logical Extension’
  • The Love Song of T.S.Eliot and fandom  
  • Fan Fiction – as Dickens (Might) Have Written It
  • Redefining the EveryFan? Implicated reading and janeites on-line
  • Flexible Dancers: How Doctor Who fan fiction subverts and confirms the elements inherent in the romance novel genre
  • A Revamped Lover? The Limitations of the Romance Format in Black Dagger Brotherhood Slas
  • ”This Man Is My Friend – Nobody [Else] Touches Him”: Paris/Kim Fan Fiction from Star Trek: Voyager
  • Sex, power and kittens – human-animal transformations in Torchwood fan fiction
  • “It takes a real man to have a baby”: heterophobia or heteroflexibility in Supernatural mpreg
  • t fan fiction is a form of derivative or appropriative fiction
  • I suggest that we need to look toward tropes, the use of familiar plots, scenarios, and characterization as central organizing and generating principles for fan fiction communities.
  • yaoi and its Western fans are more receptive to a queer interpretation than slash and its fans are. Other key points raised by the research included fans’ rejection of ‘mainstream’ characterization of females, a strong awareness of legal and ethical issues and a desire to challenge contemporary accounts of ‘their’ fandom.  
  • Polish fans unlike their American or European colleagues are quite puritan.
  • Should the fan fiction writer be seen first and foremost as a reader, which is undoubtedly an essential role in fan fictions?
  • where a general rule is to stay true to the canon’s descriptions of characters,
Nele Noppe

cupidsbow: Women/Writing 1: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, by cupidsbow - 0 views

  • feminist theory
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ.
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  • scratch the surface and the result of those practices is that women are seriously disadvantaged.
  • If the "wrong" people overcome the prohibitions and manage to write, the work is often made to vanish, usually through the ordinary, polite workings of class privilege. The widespread blindness to the work is based on illogical assumptions that are accepted as reasonable and never questioned. In fact, questioning the silence is considered rude and boorish,
  • certain topics are considered more important than others, based on an idea of how "universal" they are, and therefore art about them is innately more valuable.
  • that books can be misread due to assumptions about the author, so for instance, before Wuthering Heights was known to be written by a woman, it was considered by critics to be about the nature of evil, and afterwards, it was considered a romance.
  • [Pollution of Agency and the Double Standard of Content are clearly aspects related to the general contempt in which fanfiction is held by the wider writing community--it's just porn; it's all about men doing boring domestic stuff; they aren't even men, they're written like fourteen year old girls; only crazy, obsessive stalkers write that stuff; it's all so derivative and unoriginal, such a waste of talent.]
  • This is when works or authors are belittled by assigning them to the wrong category, or arranging categories so that all the "wrong" people don't fit the prestigious ones.
  • When a work by the "wrong" person actually makes it into the canon of Literature or Serious Art, it is only because they are one of a kind who produced this one thing out of the blue.
  • because successful women's writing is isolated from its influences, it is often accused of having a poor or informal style
  • Anomalousness.She wrote it, but there are very few of her.
  • Lack of Models.While it's clear that women don't write in a vacuum, the disappearance of so many "wrong" works from the mid- to long-term literary record means that each new generation of women artists has to find or make a new network of their own.
  • Responses.This is another fascinating chapter, which looks at the ways in which women have faced the silence and decided to write anyway.
  • Fanfiction writers may conceive of what is being made in different ways (art, craft, fun, porn, and so on), but there is no question, at least within the bounds of the subculture, that we can write! That is quite a different expectation to that of the wider world,
  • Aesthetics.This chapter discusses the impact of not having a visible female tradition on art in general. For a start, it means that many of the representations of women within art are deeply flawed, as they are based on stereotypes. It also means the hierarchy of art is skewed so that the "masculine" values are at the top, all others at the bottom, like so:"high art" [means] man, mankind, the individual man, individuality, humans, humanity, the human figure, humanism, civilization, culture, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, Christianity, spiritual transcendence, religion, nature, true form, science, logic, creativity, action, war, virility, violence, brutality, dynamism, power, and greatness.... "low art": Africans, Orientals, Persians, Slovaks, peasants, the lower classes, women, children, savages, pagans, sensuality, pleasure, decadence, chaos, anarchy, impotence, exotica, eroticism, artifice, tattoos, cosmetics, ornaments, decoration, carpets, weaving, patterns, domesticity, wallpaper, fabrics, and furniture. (p. 114-5 Russ quoting Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff)
  • Another consequence of the focus on a male value system, is that associations are made between things like size and quality (the number of pages in a book, for instance, affects how prestigious it is); hence short stories [again: fanfiction!] are not all that important compared to novels
  • Women always write in the vernacular.
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • it's easy for people outside of fanfiction fandom to dismiss the whole thing on a number of grounds
  • There is no doubt in my mind that fanfiction offers an amazing network for women writers, and given the advantages of the internet, it would be almost impossible to make this writing disappear en masse as has so often happened to women's writing in the past.
  • most of them described by Russ: yes, she wrote it, but we don't really know who "she" is; yes, she wrote it, but she totally shouldn't have (only perverts/stalkers/sluts/thieves write it); yes, she wrote it, but it's not important (because it's not about high culture ideas, it's unpaid, it's vernacular, it's just porn, it's derivative, it's bad); yes, she wrote it and it's actually good, but it's a one-off fluke and it's not really fanfiction anyway (it's a homage, a pastiche, a post-modern experiment, it won the Pulitzer); yes, she went on to write successful original novels in spite of her fanfiction beginnings (but she's not like all the others who do it, and let's not talk about it anyway, because it opens us up to copyright violation lawsuits).
  • very hard to combat, as people are sure these biases are "common sense".
  • Do we really want to be part of a culture that endorses a silencing of women by keeping us in our places in the ghetto? Or is this beyond the purview of something we do for fun, as a hobby?
  • It seems to me that part of why fanfiction can so easily be written off is because we so carefully police it, keeping our work in the unpaid ghetto along with other women's crafts.
  • Not just because of the "silencing" issue, but because of the female poverty issue
  • Then again, fanfiction's market isn't the commercial publishing market--fanfiction is part of the long-tail economy of the internet, so the same rules don't apply.
  • I still think that the fanfiction community is the most amazing women's art culture I've ever experienced, and quite possibly the most amazing there has ever been, just in terms of sheer numbers and output. And perhaps that is enough; perhaps one of the foundation-stones of the fanfiction community is that it doesn't have to engage directly with capitalist imperatives, and messing with that ethos might unbalance everything.
  • I do feel angry, though, that this amazing outpouring of female talent is written off as nothing but derivative porn written by a bunch of crackpots. It makes me want to punch things and scream at the world, "Are you all asleep, or just deliberately stupid?"
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