fanfic forensics

Eco distinguishes between the concept within aesthetic theory that every text is more or less open, because every text can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the reader brings to the text, and his more specific concept of the open work.

As examples

He also cites texts which on the surface are more traditional.

Facing the indifference and hostility of the vast majority of their populations -- sometimes referred to as "non-publics," to indicate their disinterest in establishment culture -- European policy-makers reinterpreted their own roles. They began to see themselves as needing to address the many cultures within their societies, not simply promoting the traditional "high art" culture favored by wealthy patrons in the past. Instead of focusing on how to lure people into established arts institutions, these cultural ministers turned to a set of much broader social questions: How can we begin to overcome the already-entrenched alienation of modernization? How can we retrieve and preserve relevant traditions? How might we facilitate cross-cultural communication, even cooperation? How can we help animate community life?

Among the primary means devised to realize the aims of cultural democracy is community animation.

What's most important for advocates of cultural democracy is to keep the big picture in mind.

n particular, recent work on online gift economies has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift economy's ethos for its own economic gain.

There are a number of important reasons why fandom (and those who study it) continue to construct gift and commercial models as discrete economic spheres. This strategic definition of fandom as a gift economy serves as a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions. H

The broader field of social semiotics is the site of intersection between two more currents, not usually called semiotics but in practice implicitly or explicitly drawing on a social semiotic orientation and tool kit. ‘Discourse’ theory/analysis is widely used in many branches of social research. ‘Cultural studies’ is likewise a popular research tradition. Social Semiotics, which has many affinities with both, can act as a grand node, linking each to the other, reframing them within a wide network of related traditions. At the same time it can serve the salutary effect of bringing these vigorous traditions into the field of semiotics, energising semiotics and making its insights more widely available and appreciated.

Look, I get the idea that there is One True Standard of aesthetic goodness. What I don’t get is the further conclusion that if we only got rid of the dreck we’d have more of the good stuff. I guess it’s yet another expression of the romantic idea that Art comes out of nowhere, rather than in reaction to the creator’s surroundings.

These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on

fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.

The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—

Indeed, the negative responses to "Monster" provide an interesting case study in the context of increasingly intimate relations between television producers and viewers, an intimacy that, generally speaking, is highly desirable to fans. What interests me particularly is that in some cases this increased intimacy is not desirable; for some fans, and in some contexts, distance is preferred.

While previous scholarly attempts to characterize slash generically have linked it to fantasy/science fiction, romance, and a genre termed intimatopic, I prefer the descriptive power of melodrama as a type, a narrative style, and a cultural mode. As I will explicate further below, many slash stories dwell on situations of intense pathos, scenarios of emotional surfeit nearly unmatched in any other form of narrative.

In short, melodramatic identification cannot be restricted to an affective relationship with a character or plotline; rather, it is a relationship to a continuous interweaving of texts—including both fan fiction and the narrative of the fan herself—into a greater text that the fan knows as "my show.

I haven't a clue why so little is written about humor. Having a background in sociolinguistics, I have a particular interest in language practices and in how things get said, not just in what gets said. Humor plays such an important role in the community making process, cutting across fan interactions and practices, including romantic and erotic talk.

As I argued in Cyberspaces, humor is bound up with class, gender and by extension race and ethnicity and nationality.

Due South with its American fan base was part of what Chris Barker calls reverse flow. In his 1999 book, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, he challenged the notion that the one-way flow of American programming to the rest of the world would lead to the homogenization of culture and the erasure of local and national identities. The more likely outcomes, he argued, were fragmentation and hybridization.

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.

there are different strains of digital humanities. Bethany might define those strains as “old” and “new.” I’d probably divide things along more disciplinary lines, looking to a tradition of digital humanities that comes out of literature and one that comes out of public history. If I had to place myself along these axes I’d probably land where the “new” and “history” strains meet. There are, of course, lots of other ways to slice the pie.

digital humanities starts to look a lot like a social network. Indeed, in some ways digital humanities increasingly is a social network built, for better or worse, on Twitter’s platform.

It takes its values from the Internet

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he Death of the Author is an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes.

The essay argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text, and says that writing and creator are unrelated.

In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."