fanfic forensics

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