While writing contemplating post/modernism and textuality, I was reminded of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bookshop's list of professionally published titles that qualify as fanfiction. Among the titles noted are (just pulling a few out as examples):
It seems that the definition in use here is that 'fanfiction' is "that which interacts intertextually with an existing work." By that standard, there's (obviously) a boatload out there we can call fanfiction. More than that, apparently, if the determination of "acting intertextually" can apply when the original text is a person or group of persons, or even a painting. Or two. It's possible to have intertextuality when you have this text and that text, but first you kinda need a text on both ends, and it wouldn't hurt to have a little inter, too. The more we frame retellings and adaptations — even biographies! — as intertextual, or as fanfiction, the more we dilute the concept.
This is why, as much as I'd like to applaudbookshop's collection of titles, I think it's also a disservice. I get the intention (or at least the intention appears to be) tacking some credibility onto the label of 'fanfiction'. I get that it's supposed to make the average fanfiction person say, "gee, I'm in a long line of Very Credible and Certainly Valid legacy of storytelling!" From the number of responses, there's no denying the list hit a major nerve, and I think that says something right there. ( But I think it's saying something else, something possibly even more important, that's getting drowned out in the self-congratulatory aspect of the post. )
bookshop's list of professionally published titles that qualify as fanfiction. Among the titles noted are (just pulling a few out as examples): - the musical Cats, a fanfic of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
- Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a modernized reworking of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
- John Guare's decorated play Six Degrees of Separation, RPF of real-life con artist David Hampton and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
- Neil Gaiman's 2004 Hugo-Award-winning Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover fanfic, "A Study in Emerald," his Lovecraft fanfic, "I, Cthulhu," and his Chronicles of Narnia fanfic, "The Problem of Susan."
- Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland's novel The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and the 2 Vermeer paintings they are fictions about, real and imaginary.
It seems that the definition in use here is that 'fanfiction' is "that which interacts intertextually with an existing work." By that standard, there's (obviously) a boatload out there we can call fanfiction. More than that, apparently, if the determination of "acting intertextually" can apply when the original text is a person or group of persons, or even a painting. Or two. It's possible to have intertextuality when you have this text and that text, but first you kinda need a text on both ends, and it wouldn't hurt to have a little inter, too. The more we frame retellings and adaptations — even biographies! — as intertextual, or as fanfiction, the more we dilute the concept.
This is why, as much as I'd like to applaud
bookshop's collection of titles, I think it's also a disservice. I get the intention (or at least the intention appears to be) tacking some credibility onto the label of 'fanfiction'. I get that it's supposed to make the average fanfiction person say, "gee, I'm in a long line of Very Credible and Certainly Valid legacy of storytelling!" From the number of responses, there's no denying the list hit a major nerve, and I think that says something right there. ( But I think it's saying something else, something possibly even more important, that's getting drowned out in the self-congratulatory aspect of the post. )