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At the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation. The general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their property

The notion of the gift is thus central to fan economy as it currently stands, although, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her essay in this issue, it may be time for the community to consider creating an alternative model that will permit women to profit.

This exchange in the fan community is made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.2 The tension and negotiation between the three result in fan creation of social relationships that are constructed voluntarily on the basis of a shared interest—perhaps a media source like a TV show or, perhaps, fandom itself. Fan communities as they are currently comprised, require exchanges of gifts: you do not pay to read fan fiction or watch a fan-made music vid.

Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes beyond self-protective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations, their lawyers, and their cease-and-desist letters. Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.

But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's move to the Internet means that the items exchanged are hyperreal and capable of being endlessly replicated.

Money is presented less as a payment than as a token of enjoyment.

The items offered as gifts are not destroyed but are incorporated into a multivocal dialogue that creates a metatext, the continual composition of which creates a community, and the rhetorical stance of that dialogue is to create a gendered space.

The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but they themselves are not meaningful outside their context.

Each proffered item represents an aspect of the giver: time, talent, love, desire. The result—"personally charged"12 gifts, responses in kind—generates a female-gendered community, but the role of the individual within that community is equally crucial.

When the rules of exchange are broken, the punishment is swift. One recent incident that exemplifies this was the attempt of (male) venture capitalists to profit financially from (female-generated) fan fiction.

The FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commerce-based) transaction with fan-created items will not be tolerated. Henry Jenkins notes, "They simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction."17 The site attempted to bypass the artwork-generating [End Page 117] fan community altogether—a serious misreading of FanLib's audience. FanLib broke the rules of the community's engagement by misreading "community" as "commodity," and the site failed thanks to intense backlash, an expression of fannish defense of their field of value.

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.

it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a far more tangible sense.

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:

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.

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

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

already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer.

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

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.

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

Content in itself is not the issue--Child pornography has been outlawed because the methods involved in production involve real children in possibly abusive circumstances. How the material was produced is what makes it criminal, not what impression it conveys on the audience. 

Child pornography involving real children being sexually abused is horrid beyond words. For that very reason, I find it reprehensible to mix together such acts of human misery and suffering with illusionary fantasy that exists only in the author's imagination. Widening the definition of child pornography to include fictional material belittles the gravity of real sex abuse.

Many convicted criminals also cite the Bible as their inspiration of conducting astonishingly savage acts, and yet few would attribute the Bible as the root cause of such criminal behavior. Why?--Because free societies accept the principle that people are responsible for their own actions.

It is very dangerous to restrict the actions and rights of citizens based on the principle that some limited number of individuals may act irresponsibly. This is the equivalent of removing knives from the household kitchen because someone used a meat cleaver to commit a crime. Again, this logic is unbelievably reckless as well.

Furthermore, crime statistics published by the Japanese police themselves show no causality between the proliferation of erotic material and sex crimes. The crime rate has dramatically decreased since WW2 while the availability of erotica and violent fictional entertainment has risen by leaps and bounds during the same period.

It is easily imaginable that an endless cycle of accusations and denials will unfold regarding establishing the "true age" of fictional characters. Authors and publishers will more than likely attempt to proclaim that the characters look young, but they are actually above the age of 18. Physical attributes vary between widely depending on race and ethnicity, not to mention fictional non-human characters.

Publishers and authors are extremely proficient in adapting toward new regulations. If graphical depictions are banned, then abstract or comedic depictions will increase.

Either an ever increasing set of symbols will be deemed to be inappropriate to be linked to a core human attribute--human sexuality--or the futility of the ban will lead the law to become impotent over all.

Even today, numerous adult manga publications have self censorship standards that are mind-boggling. Authors have complained about how some editors have insisted on having all female characters appearing in their works be endowed with large breasts because drawing women as they appear more like in real life was deemed "too childish looking." 

Banning the fictional depictions of minors involved in sexual situations will make a fundamental core human attribute taboo.

Such a ban will stifle creativity and impoverish the cultural landscape.

The value attributed to works of literature and art change over time. The works of modern art and literature from the last two centuries are filled with examples where they were deemed to be vile, corruptive trash by contemporary authorities, but now these same works enjoy high status as priceless cultural treasures.

A culture grows richer through addition, not by subtraction.

A ban on fictional depictions of minor engaged in sexual situations has the very real potential to brand individuals as sex offenders even though they have had no sexual contact with real people. I believe there could be no legal justification for destroying people's lives simple because they drew doodles on paper, but the proposed ban would create such a legal precedence. 

I am absolutely certain that history will not look back kindly upon such a ban, and it will join a long list of colossal failures of regulatory policy, such as the prohibition of alcohol in the US between 1920 to 1933, various sodomy laws, the comic book code, and bans on socialist literature in Japan during the prewar era. It is important to note that all these failed moral crusades were led by virtuous and diligent individuals intent on making the world a better place.