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Nele Noppe

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

cupidsbow.livejournal.com/239587.html

fans fan_fiction gender literature feminism fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • 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?"
Nele Noppe

Drexel CoAS E-Learning: Happy Accidents: A Must-Read for Open Scientists - 0 views

drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/...idents-must-read-for-open.html

open_access research fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 27 Aug 08 - Cached
  • In Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs; When Scientists Find What They're NOT Looking for, Morton Meyers reviews examples of the unpredictability of scientific progress.
  • A quote from the preface foreshadows the tone of the book:The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way. Consequently, not only the general public but the scientific community itself is unaware of the vast role of serendipity in medical research.
  • A quote from the preface foreshadows the tone of the book:The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way. Consequently, not only the general public but the scientific community itself is unaware of the vast role of serendipity in medical research
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way
  • The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way.
  • An applicant for a research grant is expected to have a clearly defined program for a period of three to five years. Implicit is the assumption that nothing unforeseen will be discovered during that time and, even if something were, it would not cause distraction from the approved line of research. Yet the reality is that many medical discoveries were made by researchers working on the basis of a fallacious hypothesis that led them down an unexpected fortuitous path.
  • The fact that some of us in the Open Science community are discussing this does not mean that we are advocating for the abolition of peer review or the NIH. We are not that naive. We still submit proposals and manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals (although given a choice we probably would pick an Open Access journal over one running on a paid subscription model).The point is what we do in addition to all those traditional processes.
  • Nele Noppe on 27 Aug 08
     
    The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way
Nele Noppe

havocthecat: Want to know why I'm in (Western media) fandom? - 0 views

havocthecat.livejournal.com/910106.html

gender literature fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley
  • Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley
  • Nele Noppe on 15 Mar 09
     
    Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley
Nele Noppe

The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World - 0 views

questioncopyright.org/promise

copyright history fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies.
  • For three centuries, the publishing industry has been working very hard to obscure copyright's true origins, and to promote the myth that it was invented by writers and artists.
  • make sure the public never asks exactly who this system is meant to help.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • They're fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. And by positioning the issue as a contest between the Beleaguered Artist, who supposedly needs copyright to pay the rent, and The Unthinking Masses, who would rather copy a song or a story off the Internet than pay a fair price, the industry has been astonishingly successful. They have managed to substitute the loaded terms "piracy" and "theft" for the more accurate "copying" — as if there were no difference between stealing your bicycle (now you have no bicycle) and copying your song (now we both have it).
  • Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.
  • For the vast majority of artists, copyright brings no economic benefits. True, there are a few stars — some quite talented — whose works are backed by the industry; these receive the lion's share of distribution investment, and generate a correspondingly greater profit, which is shared with the artist on better than usual terms because the artist's negotiating position is stronger. Not coincidentally, these stars are who the industry always holds up as examples of the benefits of copyright.
  • The first copyright law was a censorship law.
  • The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return for keeping a strict eye on what was printed.
  • The system was quite openly designed to serve booksellers and the government, not authors. New books were entered in the Company's Register under a Company member's name, not the author's name. By convention, the member who registered the entry held the "copyright", the exclusive right to publish that book
  • The Stationers' right was a new right, though one based on a long tradition of granting monopolies to guilds as a means of control. Before this moment, copyright — that is, a privately held, generic right to prevent others from copying — did not exist.
  • Dissolution of the monopoly might have been good news for long-suppressed authors and independent printers, but it spelled disaster for the Stationers, and they quickly crafted a strategy to retain their position in the newly liberal political climate.
  • The Stationers based their strategy on a crucial realization, one that has stayed with publishing conglomerates ever since: authors do not have the means to distribute their own works. Writing a book requires only pen, paper, and time. But distributing a book requires printing presses, transportation networks, and an up-front investment in materials and typesetting. Thus, the Stationers reasoned, people who write would always need a publisher's cooperation to make their work generally available. Their strategy used this fact to maximum advantage. They went before Parliament and offered the then-novel argument that authors had a natural and inherent right of ownership in what they wrote, and that furthermore, such ownership could be transferred to other parties by contract, like any other form of property.
  • The first recognizably modern copyright, the Statute of Anne, was passed in 1709 and took effect in 1710.
  • The Statute of Anne, taken in historical context, is the smoking gun of copyright law. In it we can see the entire apparatus of modern copyright, but in still-undisguised form. There is the notion of copyright as property, yet the property is really intended for publishers, not authors. There is the notion of benefitting society, by encouraging people to write books, but no evidence was offered to show that they would not write books without copyright. Rather, the Stationers' argument was that publishers could not afford to print books without protection from competition, and furthermore that printers could not be depended to reproduce works faithfully if given unfettered freedom to print. The corollary, they implied, was that without the prospect of reliable distribution, authors would produce fewer new works.
  • The authors who succeeded in selling this new right to printers had no particular motivation to complain — and naturally, we don't hear very much about the authors not so favored. T
  • This is the secret that today's copyright lobby never dares say aloud, for once it is admitted, the true purpose of subsequent copyright legislation becomes embarrassingly clear.
  • Having granted the premise that copyrights should exist at all, the English government found themselves under pressure to extend copyright terms further and further.
  • The industry's centuries-long campaign for strong copyright law is not merely a reflexive land grab, however. It's a natural economic response to technological circumstances. The effect of the printing press, and later of analog sound recording technology, was to make creative works inseparable from their means of distribution. Authors needed publishers the way electricity needs wires. The only economically viable method of reaching readers (or listeners) was the bulk print run
  • There is nothing inherently exploitative about this; it's just straightforward economics. From a business point of view, a print run is a daunting and risky project.
  • When one realizes that all this must happen before the work has generated a penny of revenue, it is little wonder that publishers argue hard for copyright. The publisher's initial investment — that is, their risk — in any individual work is greater, in economic terms, than the author's
  • The arrival of the Internet fundamentally changed this equation.
  • But today, the medium over which content is distributed can be unrelated to the medium in which it is ultimately consumed. The data can be sent over a wire, at essentially no cost, and the user can print up a copy at her own expense, and at whatever quality she can afford, on the other end [7]. Furthermore, it is no longer important to possess the master; in fact, the concept of the master copy itself is obsolete. To make a perfect copy of a printed work is actually quite hard, although making a corrupt or abridged copy is very easy. Meanwhile, to make a perfect copy of a digital work is trivially easy — it's making an imperfect copy that requires extra effort.
  • Thus, a publisher's total expense was proportional to the number of copies distributed. In such a situation, it is reasonable to ask that each user bear a portion of the costs of distribution.
  • Thus the practice of charging the same fee for each copy, regardless of how many copies there are or who made them, is now unjustifiable. The cost of producing and distributing the work is now essentially fixed, no longer proportional to the number of copies
  • From society's point of view, every dollar spent beyond the amount needed (if any) to bring the work into existence in the first place is a waste, an impediment to the work's ability to spread on its own merits.
  • The Internet did something the Company of Stationers never anticipated: it made their argument a testable hypothesis. Would creators still create, without centralized publishers to distribute their works? Even minimal exposure to the Internet is enough to provide the answer: of course they will.
  • Imagine the simplest scenario: you walk into the neighborhood print shop and tell the clerk the Web address of the book you want. A couple of minutes later, the clerk comes back with a freshly printed, hardbound book, straight off the Internet. He rings up the sale. "That'll be eight dollars. Would you like to add the one dollar author's suggested donation?" Do you say yes? Perhaps you do, perhaps not — but note that when museums charge a voluntary admission fee, people often pay it. The same sort of dynamic is at work in the copy shop. Most people are happy to pay a tiny extra bit on top of some larger amount, if they have their wallet out already and think it's for a good reason.
  • This is not the only possible system, and it can easily coexist with others. Those not convinced by voluntary donations should consider another method: the Fund and Release system (also called the Threshold Pledge system [9]).
Nele Noppe

SAMPLE REALITY · On Hacking and Unpacking My (Zotero) Library - 0 views

www.samplereality.com/...nd-unpacking-my-zotero-library

academia research zotero phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 19 Mar 10 - Cached
  • We’ve all had that experience of reading a journal article or — damn it! — a mother effing blog in which the author tackles clearly, succinctly and without pause some deep research concern that we’ve been pondering for years, waiting for it to blossom into a Beautiful Idea in our writing before going public with it. And POOF! somebody else says it first, and says it better. Keeping our sources private is the talisman against such deadly blows to our research, akin to some superstitious taboo against revealing first names. We academics are true believers in occult knowledge. To put it in the starkest terms possible: before I published my library I was concerned that someone might take a look at my sources and somehow reverse engineer my research. Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project. Are we in the humanities really that ridiculous and self-important? Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project. My teaching and research adds only infinitesimally incrementally to the storehouse of human knowledge.
  • I don’t mean to belittle what scholars in the humanities do à la Mark Bauerlein. On the contrary, I think that what we do — striving to understand human experience in a chaotic world — is so crucial that we need to share what we learn, every step along the way. Only then do all the lonely hours we spend tracing sources, reading, and writing make sense.
  • Nele Noppe on 19 Mar 10
     
    "We've all had that experience of reading a journal article or - damn it! - a mother effing blog in which the author tackles clearly, succinctly and without pause some deep research concern that we've been pondering for years, waiting for it to blossom into a Beautiful Idea in our writing before going public with it. And POOF! somebody else says it first, and says it better. Keeping our sources private is the talisman against such deadly blows to our research, akin to some superstitious taboo against revealing first names. We academics are true believers in occult knowledge. To put it in the starkest terms possible: before I published my library I was concerned that someone might take a look at my sources and somehow reverse engineer my research. Let's face it, I'm an English professor. It's not as if I'm working on the Manhattan Project. Are we in the humanities really that ridiculous and self-important? Let's face it, I'm an English professor. It's not as if I'm working on the Manhattan Project. My teaching and research adds only infinitesimally incrementally to the storehouse of human knowledge."
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Should Fan Fiction Be Free? - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...48.4.de-kosnik.html

fans fanwork law economy fan_fiction feminism

shared by Nele Noppe on 25 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture
  • The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;
  • Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Digital appropriation artists have developed a number of monetization models: royalties, distribution agreements, reasonably priced licenses that permit remix practitioners to sell their appropriations legally, and small-scale compensation intended only to reimburse remixers for their outlay. Although fan filmmakers and game modders have experimented with these models, fan fiction writers have not conducted similar experiments in marketing their works.
  • Fanfic authors who think that selling appropriative art is always and absolutely against the law are mistaken. No such case law exists, and many appropriating artists make money from their work today without constantly encountering legal trouble.
  • Why, then, do fic writers resist earning income from their output? Many scholars of fan studies claim that fan fiction is, and must remain, free—that is, "free of charge," but also "free of the social controls that monetization would likely impose on it"—because it is inherently a gift culture, as Hellekson describes in this issue. In fact, even the fan organization, the Organization of Transformative Works, one of whose goals is to redefine fan works as transformative and therefore legal, states: "The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy."
  • Therefore, writing fan fiction for personal gain—financial, psychological, or emotional—aligns with the fact that self-enrichment is already inherently an important motivation for women to produce and consume fanfic. For some women, belonging to an affinity group or discussing stories with fellow writers and readers is not the primary reason for engaging with this type of fiction.
  • The rewards of participating in a commercial market for this genre might be just as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture; and the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies.
  • If fans successfully professionalize and monetize fan fiction, the amateur culture of fic writing will not disappear.
  • Although fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.
  • However, an even greater danger than this is that fan fiction may not be monetized at all, in which case no one, particularly women authors, will earn the financial rewards of fanfic's growing popularity. Only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain from these writers' volunteer work.
  • if women can formulate a model for the monetization of their artworks, the gap will be narrowed.
  • In the absence of such experimentation, women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future. Woolf asked of her forebears, "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?" Will our generation answer that we have been giving our talents away as gifts, rather than insisting on the worth of our work?
  • . [End Page 123]
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  • [End Page 119]
Nele Noppe

Why Heather can write - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx

education fan_fiction fans fanwork harry_potter literature fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try-and too often fail-to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)
  • such informal teaching occurs across a range of other online communities.
  • we could talk about young anime fans who are teaching each other Japanese language and culture in order to do underground subtitling of their favorite shows.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on their work while they are still in high school? And what happens when those young writers compare notes, becoming critics, editors, and mentors? Will they develop their craft more quickly-and develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about storytelling?
  • And writing about Harry offers them something else, too: an audience with a built-in interest in the stories-an interest that would be difficult to match with stories involving original fictional characters. The power of popular culture to command attention is being harnessed at a grassroots level to find a readership for these emerging storytellers.
  • themes that could not be discussed so openly in a school assignment and that might be too embarrassing to address through personal narratives or original characters.
  • Fandom is providing a rich haven to support the development of bright young minds that might otherwise get chewed up by the system, and offering mentorship to help less gifted students to achieve their full expressive potential. Either way, these teens are finding something online that schools are not providing them.
Nele Noppe

How Fan Fiction Can Teach Us a New Way to Read Moby-Dick (Part One) - 0 views

henryjenkins.org/...an_fiction_can_teach_us_a.html

education literature fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Oct 08 - Cached
  • remarkable pedagogical and artistic approach taken by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the Artistic Director of the Mixed Magic Theater. Ricardo worked to get incarcerated youth to read Moby-Dick by having them rewrite and update Melville's novel for the 21st century
  • I had an opportunity--and this was probably the best part of the experience for me--as a teacher to release their imaginations. Boy oh boy, no matter how much I write I'll never be able to fully capture the degree to which their imaginations were released and they released me, too, to say you don't have to play by the ABC game. You don't have to go by the numbers. You can rethink these characters and it's okay, and you can honor them and rethink them at the same time. When we started the writing process, I started by saying, "Pick a character and write a story about the character." They all chose their favorite character in the novel and wrote a story about just their character.
Nele Noppe

Creativity in amateur multimedia: Popular culture, critical theory, and HCI - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

amateur_professional fans internet presentation_cwwc creativity open_source theory HCI openness machinima games technology authors communal medium technological_determinism visual_language phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Today, especially in academic circles, this pop culture phenomenon is little recognized and even less understood.
  • These analyses reveal relationships among emerging amateur multimedia aesthetics, common software authoring tools, and the three theorizations of creativity discussed
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
       
      VERBAND FANWERK - OPEN SOURCE
  • This paper explores the enabling factors, especially the role of multimedia authoring tools, in the recent explosion of amateur multimedia.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Yet control over popular culture by mass media is clearly eroding
  • HCI practitioners have explored how software interfaces can enhance and support users in general and creativity in particular. Its analytical tools for examining the relationships between tools and a concrete group of users vis-à-vis a well-defined explication of tasks both solve and create problems. The ability to specify these relationships explicitly greatly facilitates the design of systems; yet that same explicit specificity also defines creativity a priori in cybernetic terms more friendly to computers than to the culturally diverse and rich practice of creativity
  • Critical theory—an umbrella term that encompasses literary theory, continental philosophy, and communication theory, among others—offers sophisticated theoretical resources for the study of cultural artifacts and their use in the communities that create them. Many of these theories ground themselves in the materiality of the cultural artifacts they study; yet the material layer for which these theories were once developed were largely textual. The movement of cultural artifacts from the physical to digital poses a deep challenge (and some risk) for critics studying digital media with these theories
  • this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI, poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.
  • Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.
  • Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was most often put in service of professional productivity software.
  • HCI often characterizes creativity in rationalistic, intentional, and scientific ways. For example, Schneiderman (2002, 2003) proposes a creativity framework for, in his words, “generating excellence” with four parts: collect, relate, create, and donate. With it, he hopes to capture the social, iterative, associational, and distributional characteristics of creativity, especially as described by cognitive science. Evident in this perspective is an effort to model creativity, which is seen as a social activity, with certain structural features that take place in environments conducive to creativity.
  • All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses, lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here, Page 17 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 15 and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses
  • Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses, in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers. Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist- individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.
  • The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.
  • The role of the author-function is, among other things, to control the polyvalence intrinsic to texts, such that the author, rather than performing the creative role of bringing the text into the world, performs the role of constraining the meaning of the text within a society.
  • (Foucault, 1969/2000, p. 206). Therefore, writing is a destabilizing force that threatens to transform the discourse in which it operates and to swallow up its own author. It is important to remember that Foucault is not limiting his analysis to literary texts; he explicitly includes scientific and academic writing,
  • In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule- transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages
  • Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion Page 19 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 17 that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)
  • Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.
  • Perhaps the foremost theorist of technological determinism is Jacques Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), who argues that individuals, science, and government are all “conditioned” by technology.
  • Like Schneiderman (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the comparatively meek procedures of science and governance
  • As a result, according to Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.
  • Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003) characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).
  • For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.
  • To answer this question, it is useful to consider what the three traditions share in common. All consider creativity in the context of professionalism and knowledge production. Creativity is not simply about painting a pretty new picture or expressing a personal emotion; it contributes to discourses about the world and our place in it. All three traditions also understand creativity as situated within systems—networks of software-supported experts, discursive sign systems, or systems of production and consumption. All of these implicitly reject romantic notions of the individual creative genius and pure self-expression; implied in this is a rejection or at least dilution of individual intention as the prime mover of creativity
  • Questions one might ask include the following: What are the social and technical conditions or structures necessary for the generation of these artifacts? What is the discourse of amateur multimedia? What is the minimal unit of meaning? In what ways does its production establish relationships between authors, viewers, technologies, meaning, and ideology?
  • A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing) more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?
  • Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
     
    "1"
Nele Noppe

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books - 0 views

weekly.ahram.org.eg/...bo3.htm

umberto_eco literature internet open_work phd phd_unfinished

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The WWW is the Great Mother of All Hypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. The Web is the general system of all existing hypertexts. Such a difference between text and system is enormously important,
  • Today there are new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem, can be transformed to hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no longer, or not only, a physical one, but rather one that concerns the very nature of creative activity, of the reading process, and in order to unravel this skein of questions we have first of all to decide what we mean by a hypertextual link.
  • Notice that if the question concerned the possibility of infinite, or indefinite, interpretations on the part of the reader, it would have very little to do with the problem under discussion.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • No: what are presently under consideration are cases in which the infinity, or at least the indefinite abundance of interpretations, are due not only to the initiative of the reader, but also to the physical mobility of the text itself, which is produced just in order to be re-written. In order to understand how texts of this genre can work we should decide whether the textual universe we are discussing is limited and finite, limited but virtually infinite, infinite but limited, or unlimited and infinite.
  • First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.
  • If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
  • Grammars, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are systems: by using them you can produce all the texts you like. But a text itself is not a linguistic or an encyclopaedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
  • A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.
  • Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.
  • How can hypertextual strategies be used to "open" up a finite and limited text?
  • The first possibility is to make the text physically unlimited, in the sense that a story can be enriched by the successive contributions of different authors and in a double sense, let us say either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. By this I mean that given, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, the first author proposes a starting situation (the girl enters the wood) and different contributors can then develop the story one after the other, for example, by having the girl meet not the wolf but Ali Baba, by having both enter an enchanted castle, having a confrontation with a magic crocodile, and so on, so that the story can continue for years. But the text can also be infinite in the sense that at every narrative disjunction, for instance, when the girl enters the wood, many authors can make many different choices. For one author, the girl may meet Pinocchio, for another she may be transformed into a swan, or enter the Pyramids and discover the treasury of the son of Tutankhamen. This is today possible, and you can find on the Net some interesting examples of such literary games.
  • AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.
  • Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both.
  • I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.
  • A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.
  • All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.
  • n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.
  • At the last borderline of free textuality there can be a text that starts as a closed one, let us say, Little Red Riding Hood or The Arabian Nights, and that I, the reader, can modify according to my inclinations, thus elaborating a second text, which is no longer the same as the original one, whose author is myself, even though the affirmation of my authorship is a weapon against the concept of definite authorship. The Net is open to such experiments, and most of them can be beautiful and rewarding. Nothing forbids one writing a story where Little Red Riding Hood devours the wolf. Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and with the profound charms of books.
  • A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.
  • Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
  • That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.
  • Its model is not so much a straight line as a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestial images at any new navigation point.
  • Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.
  • Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.
  • Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.
  • There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.
  • Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.
  • Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
  • TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.
  • Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
  • Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.
Nele Noppe

popblog: Sex in Polish Sci-Fi Fan Fiction - Part I - 0 views

popularny.blogspot.com/...sci-fi-fan-fiction-part-i.html

fandom poland science_fiction fan_fiction phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Polish fans do not use LiveJournal
  • Blogging is not very popular (yet?)
  • Polish fans still use Bulletin Boards, in fact their popularity increases and nothing predicts their demise.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Stories are not categorized, they just come in turn, they are not labeled in any way so it is almost impossible to tell what the fiction is about without reading it.
  • promiscuous or puritan
  • One hundred and twelve fans
  • females
  • The most probable explanation might be that fans believe writing fan fiction in order to be a real fan is unnecessary. Non-writers’ experience is not poorer than writers’
  • Fans frequently underlined the need to “expand” the universe, to show scenes producers have not included in official productions, to change something according to their likings, to “be a part of” the universe, to have fun, to intensify the reception and pleasures stemming from it, to improve writing techniques, to build up prestige in fan community, to interest others (non-fans) with the universe they like, to express their worldview or emotions, to show the world their talents, to fulfill their needs of creativity.
  • of a problem that occurs within Polish fandom – the inability to distinguish between different genres of fan fiction and ignorance of terminology used by Western fans.
  • 69 out of 112 respondents confessed that they wrote fan fiction at least once in a lifetime.
  • It is evident that more men than women and that more young people (from 16 to 25) are penchant for creating fan fiction. It is worth noticing that fans’ assumptions about proportions of men and women who write fan fiction do not tally with an actual state.
Nele Noppe

Humanistic Coding? | Re-mediation Roomy-nation - 0 views

www.patrickgmj.net/186

programming humanities phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 16 May 10 - Cached
  • Humanities/Teaching Practices and Principles Inefficiency Thinking and reflection from a humanities perspective is anything but efficient. It's not about the straightest path to a goal, it's about exploring the various twists and turns along the way. Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant / Success in Circuit Lies. Specs/schmecs In the humanities, we want to open up as many possibilities as we can. Explore. Take a random path and see what happens. Your final draft of an analysis will always be very different from what you first thought you were going to produce. Complexify When's the last time you heard a humanist say or write, "I'd like to simplify that idea."? It's just not what we do. We like to "complicate the idea", "explore the nuances", "unpack the implicit assumptions". "Complexify". Scope-creep One of the hardest things to explain to a student in the humanities is what, exactly, it takes to move from writing a B paper to writing an A paper. If you are bold and tenured, you might tell them that they need to give "a certain 'je ne se qua'", to which the most likely response is, "WTF?". I think that what we want is scope-creep. Go beyond what we've covered in class. Explore things that you think are suggested in the assignment, but aren't explicit in the assignment. Move beyond the specs, and power through sorting out the consequences of doing so. Scope-creep is the bread-and-butter of the humanities. Maybe of any pursuit in academia, for that matter?
Nele Noppe

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind - ChronicleReview.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...04b01001.htm

internet education readers academia plwo fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 01 Dec 09 - Cached
  • So let's restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces.
  • The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can't bridge them.
  • er federal technology subsidies (the E-Rate program) had granted 30 percent more schools in the state Internet access, they determined that "the additional investment
  • Nele Noppe on 01 Dec 09
     
    Don't agree with a lot of points here, like the title itself, but some interesting observations. Author asserts that "the shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can't bridge them". To the problem of students being unable to process long, in-depth 'traditional' texts, author offers the following solution: "let's restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces." I doubt it's even possible to create slow-reading 'islands' when the whole of students' lives takes place in a fast-reading environment, as the author confirms. Would it not be more effective/doable to adapt academic materials and the way we handle them, so that they can be better processed in 'fast-reading' manner?
Nele Noppe

Ian Bogost - Against Aca-Fandom - 1 views

www.bogost.com/...against_aca-fandom.shtml

academia fandom phd phd_unfinished

shared by Nele Noppe on 13 Aug 10 - No Cached
  • But for the academic critic, I think the stakes are higher. One can like or dislike something, but we scholars, particularly of popular media, have a special obligation to explain something new about the works we discuss. There are plenty of fans of The Wire and Mad Men and Halo and World of Warcraft out there. The world doesn't really need any more of them. What it does need is skeptics, and the scholarly role is fundamentally one of skepticism.
  • While media scholars do not solely write about what we like, the prevalence of books focused on "quality television" shows that appeal to academics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and now Mad Men—especially when compared to the lack of similar volumes or essays about more lowbrow or mainstream programs—suggests that taste is often more of a motivating factor for our scholarship than we admit. We should own up to our own fannish (or anti-fannish) tendencies regarding our objects of study, not regarding fan practices as something wholly separate from our academic endeavors by acknowledging how taste structures what we choose to write about. I'd push it further: the media scholar ought to resist aca-fandom, even as he or she embraces it. The fact that something feels pleasurable or enjoyable or good (or bad) need not be rejected, of course, but it ought to issue an itch, a discomfort. As media scholars, we ought to have self-doubt about the quality and benefit of the work we study. We ought to perform that hesitance often and in public, in order to weave a more complex web around media—not just to praise or blame particular works.
  • In this regard, I disagree with Jason when he says that "humanities scholars don't typically brand ourselves as fans of our objects of research." I think this is just plain wrong, and not just for pop-culture scholars. More often than not, humanists in general get into what they do precisely because they are head-over-heels in love with it, whether "it" be television, videogames, Shakespeare, Martin Heidegger, the medieval chanson de geste, the Greek lyric poem, or whatever else. Specialty humanities conferences are just fan conventions with more strangely-dressed attendees. Humanists are doe-eyed romantics, even as they are also snarly grouches.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Embracing aca-fandom is a bad idea. Not because it's immoral or crude, but because it's too great a temptation. Those of us who make an enviable living being champions of media, particularly popular media, must also remain dissatisfied with them. We ought to challenge not only ourselves, our colleagues, and our students—but also the public and the creators of our chosen media. We ought not to be satisfied. That's the price of getting to make a living studying television, or videogames, or even Shakespeare.
Nele Noppe

DIY Media - 0 views

portal.acm.org/citation.cfm

to_read education media

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 02 Dec 10
     
    see Lessig: remixing media is new kind of "writing"
Nele Noppe

Fanfic Symposium: Cross Fertilization of Fan and Professional Writing - 0 views

www.trickster.org/...symp94.html

fan_fiction language literature narrative fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 19 Aug 08 - Cached
  • The prevalence of such curious language use led me to think that fan-writers must have influenced one another’s diction because they read so much of one another’s writing, with the result that they incorporated the idiosyncratic as the norm.
  • These are only surface manifestations.  There are deeper phenomena.  The foremost is that the world inhabited by the characters in some fan fiction reflects the limited experiences of the writers. 
  • There is nothing wrong with this if the characters are from the American middle class.  Unfortunately, many popular shows feature people not acculturated in such a milieu—Methos, Duncan MacCleod of the Clan MacCleod, Benton Fraser, Harry Potter, Snape, Tom Paris, Chakotay, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon. . . .  Consequently, the specter of these characters spouting psychobabble is disconcerting, to say the very least.
Nele Noppe

In Which Rolanni Flails About - 0 views

rolanni.livejournal.com/364971.html

academia fandom fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 22 Oct 08 - Cached
  • I'm just as firmly in the "oh, youbetcha academia is the enemy" side of the road.
  • What seems not to be understood is that academics don't study and write articles in order to Validate the object of their study. Academics study and write articles in order to Validate themselves. As more and more people become academics, they must look further and further afield for subjects, and lo! suddenly Science Fiction isn't genre trash anymore; it's a way to secure tenure.
  • The message that many take away from their English teachers is that the only Right Way to read is by the Analysis Method, and yanno? after a long day? Much too fatiguing. Wanna watch a Jackie Chan movie?
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