readingredhead | (Reply)

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Yay for tiny hearts! <3 As I read back over this post, I also realized that basically I participate in fandom for the SAME REASON I participate in academia: not to be the sole creator of a thing, and not because my creations matter in a vacuum, but because the ways that I participate in fandom are about creating and sustaining the kind of fannish community in which I want to be able to participate. (In fact, I sort of feel like English academia and fandom are not too separate from each other, though academia would perhaps want to argue with me over that...) Like, what ARE works of literary criticism if not transformative works, that take some source material and do things with it that make it make sense in different contexts or for different audiences? When I write a paper on an 18th-century novel, the result is not just an explanation of the novel, not just a series of truth-claims that already exist within the novel that that I am merely making more visible. However much I hope that I am presenting an interpretation that is historically relevant, I also hope I'm presenting an interpretation that a) engages with the problems of the discipline of literary studies as it exists today (i.e. is meta), and b) engages with my own personal interests as they exist today. My scholarship and my creative work are continuous here, too, because I care about the ways in which transformative works -- the really good ones, at least -- allow individuals to situate themselves within a community (either a fandom or a community of scholarship on a particular topic), acknowledge the debts they owe to that community, and then work to pay it forward by advancing some kind of argument or offering up some kind of new insight.

...and the fact that I could probably go on about this forever is actually one of those other signs that I am in the right place, even if the right place still needs a little more work to be done to make it better. (In the middle of typing this comment I ended up having a conversation with my roommate about problematic gendering of emotional response in literary criticism, which is just one tip of the iceberg.) Sadly I have an actual paper to go write...