Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

THE BACKGROUND:

This post grew out of a New York Times article on the publication of the (book-form) Harry Potter Lexicon, which existed first as a website. MTV has informative and concise coverage of the issues behind the trial. We began discussing this issue at Tuesday’s screening, and Abby, feel free to tack stuff onto this post–somehow, via the design of this site, I guess, posts feel more legit than comments, and I don’t want to shut out your post just because I got to the internet earlier in the night.

THE DISCUSSION:

Of particular interest to me is the idea of transformative work. It seems to me that anything Steve Vander Ark writes in his own words (as opposed to quoting from the HP text) is, in some way transforming or adding to our understanding of Harry Potter.

“It’s not as if we are describing something that exists outside my imagination,” said Rowling, according to the MTV article, which is an interesting contention to say the least. I’m right now trying to decide whether Tolkien would agree with or chastise his most visible of fans, Rowling.

I am reluctant to get into a discussion of the HP Lexicon website, as the book/copyright issue is so interesting, but I don’t think it’s possible to fully flesh out the issue without realizing that the book came out of (and still exists as) a website. Also, once I post this, it’s really out of my hands (a transformed work?).

P.S. For those swing dancers in class, Henry Jenkins presents…THIS

I wanted to continue our conversation about symbolic pligrimages and the question of whether there really is a certain aura that surrounds texts and places of fandom. After reading Brooker and listening to the comments in class, I was thinking about the phenomenon of visiting preserved historical sites such as Plimoth Plantation and the Vanderbilt Mansion. At Plymouth, for example, actors dress up in clothes of the 1500s and stay in character as they go about their daily lives as if they really were pilgrims first settling in America. So, I would say that visitors to Plymouth can make a sort of connection to the past and put themselves physically into space that would otherwise be inaccessible. This seems to be very similar to what Brooker talks about when he talks about pilgrimages to Graceland and the Coronation Street set. He quotes Sandvoss and says, “the emotional significance of visiting a place lies in the ability of fans to put themselves physically into the otherwise textual universe” (Brooker, 160).

At the Vanderbilt Mansion, there are no actors, only tour guides that lead visitors through the home, talking about the significance of certain rooms, paintings, etc. based on the real lives and events of the Vanderbilt family. Still, when you walk through the house, there is a sort of sense of travelling in space and time in order to enter an “otherwise textual universe.” Using another quote from Brooker, “one gets a bit closer to the man and his time by being in places associated with him,” and this seems to be the phenomenon that takes place as countless visitors walk through the rooms of these mansions that have no substantial significance except through the symbolic values tour guides and visitors seem to bestow upon them.

Would we say this is a different phenomenon or practice than the types of pilgrimages and emotional connections fans make to places or other physical spaces associated with a fan object? I wouldn’t necessarily say that all visitors to Plimoth Plantation or the Vanderbilt Mansion are fans of the sites themselves, and they are not necessarily history fans either, so how do we compare what seem to be very similar yet still somehow different practices?

Oh, and on a totally different note, I just wanted to bring people’s attention to a comment I had made on Loretta’s post about 2ge+her…I had been editing the comment and it posted before I was able to finish it, but now the full comment is there, links and all. I’m not sure how that happened, but it’s fixed now. The links to O-Town music videos are good for entertainment value if nothing else if you want to check it out.