Please summarize and critically reviewing this article in easy to understand language: “Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices”. Please only do the job If you understand the article as it is difficult to understand.
Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877916628238 International Journal of Cultural Studies 2017, Vol. 20(3) 253 –269 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1367877916628238 journals.sagepub.com/home/ics Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices Natalia Samutina National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation Abstract This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’. Keywords emotions and affect, fan fiction, Harry Potter, reading for pleasure, reception studies, Russian online communities ‘Archontic literature’: an introduction This article focuses on fan fiction as a space of reading and on the peculiar features of fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. But the conclusions of this study, and the contexts in Corresponding author: Natalia Samutina, Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation Email:
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[email protected] http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F1367877916628238&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-01-28 254 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(3) which this type of reading is to be placed, may be applied not only to fan fiction or fan culture. They shed light on reading practices of the first generations of internet users, especially those keen on popular culture in its variety, regardless of whether they read (and write) fan fiction, or used to read it, or just read, view and talk online about products of popular culture. First, the internet enables users to participate in an engaged, passionate communica- tion among the enthusiasts of one piece of work or another from time to time, so that they are precisely as involved in fandom activities as their schedule or other factors allow. A present-day fan’s identity is infinitely less defined than those of the pre-internet fans, whose communication and reading practices were explored by the pioneers of fan stud- ies, such as Henry Jenkins (1992) and Camille Bacon-Smith (1992). The difference is not just in the degree of involvement in fandom practices, but also in the ever-growing num- ber of products of popular culture (books, movies, TV series, computer games, as well as discourses of popular imagery, such as zombie apocalypse or steam punk), which take turns in impressing a particular reader or viewer. Second, it is quite likely that after spending even a little while engaging in fandom online communication (reading fan fiction and its reviews or chatting with other fans on forums or in social networks) an internet user will acquire certain strategies of reading, which continue to inform this person’s subsequent reading (Jamison, 2013). Taking into account the scale of development of internet-based fan fiction reading and writing, as well as the overall scale of popular culture fans’ communication, studying these new reading practices seems to be a relevant and compelling task. This project is even more important because the reading of fan fiction has not so far received a lot of scholarly attention, however surprising this may sound. Even though fan studies is a thriving field of research, its intersection with literary theory, and especially with research into reading, has yet to be established. The recent scholarship on fan fiction as a type of literature has focused mostly on conceptualizing the structure of fan fiction texts or the literary field in general, rather than examining reading strategies of fan fic- tion readers. Of course, everyone who studies fan fiction is well aware of the fact that this is a space of active, involved, emotionally charged reading, to a great extent inseparable from writing (the unparalleled ease with which reading here transitions to writing, is one of the chief characteristics of this space). Quite a number of informative works have been dedicated to studying fan fiction as a literary field and to the prospects for research into it (Caplan, 2012; Hellekson and Busse, 2006; Pugh, 2005; Sandvoss, 2007; Tosenberger, 2014). Many of these pieces propose plausible theoretical hypotheses regarding the spe- cific organizational features of this literary field, characterized by the direct correlation of all newly created works with a certain base text or an assortment of texts, known in fan fiction communities as ‘the canon’, and by the fact that in this field the horizons of expectation are rooted primarily in the communication taking place within fandom com- munities. Another distinctive feature of today’s fan fiction is an incredible variety of forms and possibilities it offers. A fan fiction text can be a drabble of 100 words or an epic novel in four volumes; a comic skit or a horror story; a pornographic fiction or a story based on political power struggle; a same-sex romantic story, so-called slash, or a traditional heterosexual romance; prose, poetry and various mixes thereof; a ‘missing scene’ that fills in the gaps in the canon world, or a crossover that builds a new world at the intersection of Harry Potter and, for instance, Sherlock Holmes. Samutina 255 The latest attempts at giving this literary field a theoretical definition have in one way or another tried to find a meaningful concept for the distinct literary features and functions of these texts, whose quantity on the internet is growing in a geometric pro- gression. Almost no one denies that fan fiction, viewed as a corpus of texts, is a ‘post- modernist literary phenomenon par excellence’ (Stein, Busse, 2009). Apart from issues of copyright, the rules of the publishing industry, and official literary hierarchies, con- sideration of fan fiction texts by themselves makes one realize that it is extremely intense, multifunctional and sophisticated field of reading and writing, with its own principles of artistic originality (Tosenberger, 2014: 15). Researchers strive to find heu- ristically efficient terms for this field’s intense intertextuality and variability, capable of replacing such judgemental descriptors as ‘derivative’, ‘appropriative’ and ‘amateur- ish’. Thus, Abigail Derecho (2006) suggests viewing fan fiction as a continuously expanding non-hierarchical literary archive, and calls fan fiction ‘archontic literature’. Catherine Tosenberger (2014) uses the term ‘recursive literature’, reflective of fan fic- tion’s incredible textual variability together with its contemporary and literary, rather than folkloric nature. Mafalda Stasi speaks of the ‘extreme compression of meanings’ in slash fan fiction. As a result of correlating a given text not only with its ‘canon’, but also with a vast number of analogous fan fiction texts, slash writing acquires so many layers of meaning and becomes so semantically and symbolically saturated, that it may well be compared to poetry or a medieval palimpsest (Stasi, 2006). As Henry Jenkins has already observed: ‘Part of the process of becoming a fan involves learning the community’s preferred reading practices’ (1992: 284). Today the concept of ‘preferred reading practices’ should be applied not only to practices of com- munal interpretation of the ‘canon’, but also to practices of reading fan fiction texts – to any reading within the community. After every reading, a reader delves deeper into the intertextually charged space of a certain textual archive and becomes more competent in relation to this particular archive; after every critical comment she sees or discussion she participates in, she becomes more competent in the fandom reading practices. Catherine Tosenberger (2014) rightly sees exactly this specificity of fan fiction’s communicative goals and target audiences as the reason for the ‘unpublishability’ of fan fiction. Even though reworked fan fiction romances have been sometimes published to great acclaim (Fifty Shades of Grey presents here a notorious example), the best – according to the criteria of this literary field – fan fiction texts cannot be published precisely due to their dependence on the networks of references created by the particular community inces- santly working on expanding the archive of the ‘canon’. It thus seems patently obvious that any study of fan fiction as literature and reading, however theoretical its goals and objectives, should be based on vast reading and knowl- edge of a particular archive (or several archives), and on active communication within a particular community. The method of long-term participant observation, which presup- poses extensive reading and communication within fan fiction communities, appears to be an important condition for the study of specifics of this type of literature, including its distinctive reading strategies. Among other things, this method allows one to observe recurring events of individual reading, regular ‘waves’ of discussions, serialized con- flicts, significant instances of miscommunication, etc. Long-term participant observation provides an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of fan fiction readers by recording 256 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(3) patterns in discussions about texts and making notes of individual (yet recurring) reac- tions. This method also helps to highlight patterns in collective reading and writing strat- egies as represented, for instance, in the structure of fan fiction writing contests or in the text selection and evaluation criteria used by certain websites and archives. Russian Harry Potter fan fiction: readers and reading By now, I have been reading fan fiction and observing communication in various English- and Russian-speaking fandom communities for over seven years. This work grows from the material collected through membership in the Russian-speaking Harry Potter fan- dom, where I have been conducting participant observation for over five years. This community has recently been given a detailed description both in Russian and in English (Samutina, 2013a, 2013b), so I am going to mention only the most important introduc- tory facts, essential for the characterization of fandom reading. The Russian Harry Potter community is a