ENG 374 - Advanced Topics: Fan Fiction (1)

This course offers an historical study of what we now call “fan fiction.” Although typically defined by its oppositional relationship to copyright and its rootedness in a post-print literary sphere, the adaptive tendencies in Western literary history from Classical Rome onwards have inspired contemporary fandom studies. Building upon Anna Wilson’s recent work defining fan studies in an early modern context, this course proposes to examine a series of literary texts that exhibit one or more of the theoretical axes upon which Wilson builds her metric for studying fan fiction in a transhistorical context: poaching, transformation, and affect. By combining pairs of texts (potentially including: Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea; and Sense and Sensibility and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, although not all of these) with evidence of what David Brewer calls “imaginative expansion” from the adaptive literary culture of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries (potentially including portions of Paradise Lost, the many awful attempts at Tristram Shandy copycats, the textual and visual “sequels” to Gulliver’s Travels, and contemporary examples of the irrepressible culture of Jane Austen adaptations, modernizations, and re-imaginings, including the movie Clueless). As part of the theoretical grounding of the course, we will also discuss the nature of post copyright literary creation and its contrast to premodern fandoms, the shift from an exclusively print culture of fan fiction to an exclusively digital one, the complicated valorization of fan fiction writers as embodying an anti-capitalistic Robin Hood-type figure, and the demographics of the current fan fiction community, which is overwhelmingly white, female, trans, non-binary, and queer. Prerequisite(s): Writing-designated course (FYW), or ENG 201, ENG 202, or ENG 215.
(Humanities)