Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices

‘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 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 communication 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 studies, 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 number 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 fiction 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 specific 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 communities. 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.

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 progression. Almost no one denies that fan fiction, viewed as a corpus of texts, is a ‘postmodernist literary phenomenon par excellence’ (Stein, Busse, 2009). Apart from issues of copyright, the rules of the publishing industry, and official literary hierarchies, consideration 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 heuristically efficient terms for this field’s intense intertextuality and variability, capable of replacing such judgemental descriptors as ‘derivative’, ‘appropriative’ and ‘amateurish’. 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 fiction’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 communal 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 incessantly 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 knowledge of a particular archive (or several archives), and on active communication within a particular community. The method of long-term participant observation, which presupposes 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 conflicts, significant instances of miscommunication, etc. Long-term participant observation provides an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of fan fiction readers by recording patterns in discussions about texts and making notes of individual (yet recurring) reactions. This method also helps to highlight patterns in collective reading and writing strategies 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 fandom, 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 introductory facts, essential for the characterization of fandom reading.

The Russian Harry Potter community is a relatively active – even now, in 2015 – subdivision of the global fandom. The community unites those Harry Potter fans who speak Russian, whatever country they live in. Since its inception in ca. 2000–1, thousands of writers have contributed to amassing an enormous body of Harry Potter-inspired fan fiction and attracted hundreds of thousands readers – female readers, to be precise. Women of all ages, from teenagers to 40- and 50-year-olds, predominate in this fandom and represent every social and marital status, level of education, and sexual orientation. The Harry Potter fandom served as a springboard for many readers and writers who have eventually moved on to other fandoms or abandoned fan activities altogether. The Russian Harry Potter fan fiction shows an immense variety in terms of plotlines, textual forms and quality. This fandom is ‘open to the world’: a substantial portion of texts comprises translations from English; a number of participants read English, so they recommend the pieces of fan fiction they especially liked for reading and translation. Fandom-related communication occurs on many online platforms simultaneously, with the sites often expressly differentiated as to their texts quality, specific fandom interests and fandom generations. Regular day-to-day communication and specifically the readers’ exchange of impressions, which interests me the most, takes place mostly on the basis of an online-diary resource, www.diary.ru, and, lately, in dedicated groups on social networks.

The Russian Harry Potter fandom utilizes every instrument of selection and quality control known to fandoms: beta editing; pre-approval of fanfics in some archives; competitions and festivals, including a literary competition of slash fanfiction of ‘high quality’. A significant share of fandom discussions, and even conflicts, has to do with the issue of ‘constructive criticism’ within the community, which is understandable, since any criticism in fandom communication is an unmediated dialogue between a reader and the writer. The fandom has designated a community specifically for anonymous discussions, the Anonymous Harry community, whose participants do not shy away from passing quite harsh judgements. The latest ‘debate on criticism’, involving many a blog post, took place in spring 2015: that was a lengthy discussion between writers and readers about the necessity of criticism and its desired parameters. The so-called fandom battles exert considerable influence on every Russian-speaking fandom: these are large-scale contests/games of fan creativity, organized on diary.ru twice annually since 2011. In these contests of anonymously submitted works, the Harry Potter fandom has traditionally done well. In 2014, it came first out of over 200 fandoms; in 2015 it came second, after another literary fandom based on fantasy books, Reflections of Eterna by Russian writer Vera Kamsha.

Russian Harry Potter fans are active, engaged, passionate readers. Many of them have accumulated an extensive general reading experience. Like most other online-diary writers, they love flash mobs, such as the ‘Twenty facts about me’, where they would often state things like ‘I cannot conceive of myself without reading’ or ‘I learned to read very early and have been reading all the time ever since’. They read fan fiction and published books; Russian classics and modern literature; science fiction and detective fiction; children’s literature (with children) and fantasy, from Tolkien to contemporary fantasy about witches and vampires. Let me stress just several important points bearing on fan fiction reading as done by the larger part of this community of readers (exceptions notwithstanding).

Fandom reading is extraordinarily extensive: people are constantly reading each other’s fan fiction, are always on the lookout for new interesting fanfics, consult with each other, request recommendations in specifically created communities, and post requests (‘prompts’) to fandom festivals in the hopes of having fan fiction written based on their ideas. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, reading of this kind leaves many traces. Readers never cease talking about what they read, writing lengthy recommendations of the texts they enjoyed, joining more or less provocative discussions about characters’ interpretations, ‘bad endings’, and general principles of fandom writing – thus time and again answering for themselves and others questions such as ‘what do I read?’, ‘why do I read?’, ‘how do I read?’, and ‘what do I think about it?’

Excessive emotionality is one of the influential discursive norms for describing one’s aesthetic impressions to the community. Emoticons and exclamation marks, the axiological slang of the internet generation are a must-have in readers’ responses: all of these ‘blew my mind’, ‘took my breath away’, ‘sending you lots of hearts’, ‘the author’s stoned’, ‘walking on the clouds’, etc. Another very influential norm is the rule of ‘internalizing everything’, that is, speaking primarily of the reading’s impact on the reader, even when evaluating the text. Even those who use formal argumentation in giving detailed responses to readings, still fill their reviews to the brim with stories about what they felt while reading, and sometimes turn their analysis into some sort of a personal story.

The third point to remember regarding the specificity of fandom reading in the Russian-speaking Harry Potter community, is the relatively high level of its participants’ education and the similarity of their notions about the normative classic literary culture, which is highly respected and often mentioned for the sake of the writer’s self-esteem and in order to gain cultural capital in others’ eyes. Maybe this is the most important ‘Russian’ point about Russian fandom reading, which is in other aspects quite like the reading of all contemporary fan fiction audiences. Of course, Russian fan fiction writers sometimes prefer different plots or pairings in the Harry Potter universe compared to British or Japanese writers, and they also fill the stories with different social experience (examples can be found in Samutina, 2013b). But the thing that specifically characterizes Russian readers is the significant tension between their knowledge of what constitutes ‘proper literature’ and their engagement with the ‘imperfect’ fandom writing and emotional reading practices of fan fiction and popular literature. Creative writing has not been part of normative schooling strategies, either in the Soviet Union or in contemporary Russia. Literature is taught in schools as a national canon of great names and as a history of intellectual culture, as something which is directly inapproachable, should be interpreted in one or a maximum of two clearly preset ways, and is distinctly separated from pleasure. Accordingly, even while reading emotionally, the community at the same time holds ‘quality reading’ in high esteem. The alternative strategies of reading developed by fandom membership break through the barriers of a very strong normative tradition and form a highly ambivalent attitude which is a cause of constant disputes in the Russian fandom. The next section will be dedicated to the discussion of the origins of this distinction – universal in modern societies – between ‘good reading’ of a ‘proper literature’ and affective reading for pleasure.

Meanings and contexts of emotional reading

Thus, we observe extensive binge reading in the online space of an ostentatiously emotional culture. Above all, passionate communities of fandom readers clearly value the text’s ability to enchant, involve its reader in an imaginary world, keep up the suspense and produce physical reactions – not only a sexual arousal, as in the case of pornographic texts, but other reading-induced affective states as well. For example, the tension that keeps one from putting the text down unfinished makes the reader anxious and leads to binge reading, so that one reads all night long, forgoing food, neglecting commitments until after reading is over. There is also the state of deep satisfaction caused by mulling over an especially successful – both ethically and aesthetically – resolution of a complex state of affairs. Russian fandom readers have a special formula to describe this particular effect: ‘the soul folds up and unfolds again’. Readers even use this formula to search for new fanfics to read. Then there is also the surprise and amazement with a writer’s invention. Fan fiction literature is, in many ways, a world-building, an expanding of an assortment of images, characters, and their multiple interconnections. Unusual solutions may astound even a highly competent fan fiction reader. Reviews tend to phrase it as ‘I used to think that in Harry Potter, I have seen it all, but what you invented is just amazing.’ Also reviewers often mention cathartic crying, meant to express the greatest praise to the text under review, and so on.

The opposite is also true: negative perception stems mostly from the text’s inability to capture reader’s attention (right from the start). ‘Impatient communities’ would be another fitting description for fan fiction readers. In contrast to works of classical literature, which may take readers months to work through, fanfics have to capture their audience right away – or risk losing them for good. An interesting testimony comes from a reader who gave up fandom reading after a few months in favour of the infrequent and slow reading of books. When asked why, she confessed that she was afraid of forgetting how to read books altogether, because fanfics ‘pull you in from the start, they are sexy and impossible to put down’. The reader was so concerned about losing her identity, built on the principle of ‘constantly improving oneself’, that she chose rather to turn away from the temptations of fandom reading with its clear preference for reading-as-pleasure, reading-as-immersion.

When considering similarities between fandom reading and other types of literary experience, two types of reading come to mind, both characterized by a similar degree of engagement with an imaginary world and the general intensity of affect. The first is the reading of romances. The peculiarities of reader engagement with romance novels have been described a number of times, from the classical study of Janice Radway to the scholarship of the 2010s (Frantz and Selinger, 2012; Holmes, 2006; Radway 1984). Female romance readers plunge headfirst into the formulaic storyline, which stands in stark contrast to their own everyday life, and find opportunities for respite and self-improvement in fantasizing and in multiple details embellishing the otherwise standard narrative. The second reading of this kind is children’s literature. It, too, manifests an extreme engagement with an imaginary world, produces a strong reaction to images and events, and makes one want to re-read the story many times – fan fiction literature’s recursive nature may be seen as a certain equivalent to this, the differences between fanfics ‘from the same archive’ notwithstanding. Both readers of romances and children always want a book that would pull them in straight away. Both prefer to think of the world of the text as if it exists independently of language.

I assume that, in a less obvious way, similar immersive reading is typical of a number of popular culture discourses, well beyond the limits of romance reading or children’s reading: the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, the adventure novel and crime story, the historical novel and significant part of 19th- and 20th-century realistic fiction demand the same attitude from their readers. In the extreme, these possibilities of reading are latent in any type of literature. In some literary spheres, especially those related to reading classics, the literature of high modernism and the avant-garde, these capacities were successfully suppressed by the development of critical analytical practices, such as close reading, or censured as ideologically subversive: as an example of such ‘censure’, Rita Felski cites die Verfremdung (‘the estrangement effect’) in Brecht’s concept of theatre (Felski, 2008: 55–6). In other spheres, they consistently thrived, and popular culture plays a very important role here. In the former case, reading’s affective potential stood in opposition to its reflective capacity, and the pleasure of reading seemed fraught with multiple dangers. In the latter case, pleasure and amusement were consciously postulated as the primary goal of reading, while its other functions were downplayed or even considered non-existent. Such reading was criticized in modern intellectual culture as ‘meaningless’, if not harmful.

In the 2000s, a number of researchers analysed and criticized this dichotomy of rational and affective reading in literary culture as one of the ideologemes of modernity: among them were Michael Millner (2012), Michael Saler (2012), Rita Felski (2008); see also, for example, the historical works of Lyons (1997) and Wittmann (1997). They described and, most importantly, placed the contrasting programmes of critical and affective reading in historical context. The rigid modern opposition of affect and rational thinking is put in doubt so far as reading is concerned. In a similar manner, a number of other disciplines are reconsidering this binary opposition as well, for instance, in theories of non-representational geography ‘affect is understood as a form of thinking’ in the process of experiencing the city (Thrift, 2008: 175)

Michael Millner in his book with a revealing title, Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere, shows how the rules of ‘correct’, that is, detached, critical and discussable reading came to be in the late 18th to early 19th centuries as a means of banishing, or at least reducing the ‘pathological’, emotionally immersive reading, more difficult to bring into public conversation (Millner, 2012: 6). In his opinion, it was then that something like ‘Habermas’ model of reading appeared and pushed many reading practices out into the morally punishable zones of ‘bad reading’:

Habermas emphasizes the values of critical distance, autonomy, and public communication with respect to cultural texts as being essential to development of the modern public sphere. (Millner, 2012: 8)

In modern culture, emotional immersive reading is banished from the sphere of public communication: it is suppressed and exiled to the marginal spheres of reading (which are, one should remember, far from being quantitatively marginal). At the same time, contemporary research into the history of reading and popular culture plausibly demonstrates that, even though these marginal spheres lay no claim to influencing the public, they also develop laws of rational communication, evaluation and criticism, and these laws do not bar affective immersion in the text.

Michael Saler (2012) calls these zones of popular culture, consisting of such discourses as detective and adventure, or science fiction and fantasy, ‘public spheres of the imagination’. These discourses form a sizable segment of modern culture based on the principle of ironic imagination: ‘as if’. Let us pretend we believe in dragons and magic, Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu; let us delight in sojourning in various imaginary worlds. Let us, however, never forget the rational underpinnings of these worlds or miss the chance to use them as props in talking about our real world, to discuss the different strategies for better understanding of our own realities and to conceptualize the real diversity around us. In the early 20th century these principles of ironic imagination, which Saler designates as ‘delight without delusion’, quite swiftly led to the development not only of the ‘virtual worlds’ of collective imagination, but also to proto-fandoms (Saler, 2012: 98). Popular literature paves the way for discussions in readers’ communities and helps the idea of cultural diversity to take root in public spheres of the imagination.

Fandom communities do read differently, but this difference is not caused by the ignorance or marginality of their participants; neither should it be explained exclusively by the gender composition of their readership: male-only and mixed fandom communities exist as well. Contemporary educational systems and professional critical and interpretative discourses are dominated by the belief that ‘proper reading requires avoidance of excessive attachment. To penetrate, channel, or methodically address texts is to clearly divide the text from the self’ (Millner, 2012: 5). Fan fiction readers read by immersing themselves in the text and internalizing it – allowing it to become inseparable from their self. Realization of one’s (at times rather diverse) emotional needs through experiencing the text is practised here as a version of the ‘care of the self’: in other words, as one of the methods of self-cognition and emotional development. This emotional development is perfectly well discussable within the community, as are other different effects of the immersive reading.

Fandom readers use fan fiction texts to construct and discuss their axiological positions. The right to select texts for reading subjectively; the right to pass judgement on the reading from one’s own idiosyncratic standpoint – including the right to favour emotional choices (‘the text may be fine, but definitely not my cup of tea’); the right to give a detailed account of what in the text met or failed to meet one’s needs and expectations – these rights both implicitly and explicitly, as stated in multiple fan discussions about reading, form the foundation for an intense communication of readers in a fandom. They are a core of fandom reading itself.

At the same time, the emotional component of fan fiction does not prevent readers from using the more conventional ways of analysing texts. Affective reading strategies indeed have pride of place in readers’ communication. Yet, as soon as a discussion begins, the more formal analytical strategies immediately show up in support of sentiments. The majority of fan fiction readers are perfectly aware of the fact that texts take on a certain form and may be set in various modalities etc.: they, too, deal with these formal elements when they try on the role of fan fiction writers. Whenever a text needs defending from detractors, formal arguments are brought forth and may well have the desired effect on the opponents. These arguments do not substitute for subjective emotional judgements, but rather complement them.

Nevertheless, an ‘objective quality of writing’ is not what interests fan fiction readers. They seek an opportunity to establish a personal relationship with a text and to read and experience what really makes them tick. My observations on fandom reading fully confirm the conclusions drawn by Rhiannon Bury, who analyzed fan discussions of TV shows:

[fans] … have learned their lessons in bourgeois aesthetics well, the large majority respecting the boundary between thoughtful speculation based on a close reading of the text and wild speculation based on personal whim…. At the same time, they feel no need to distance themselves from their emotional attachments in favor of ‘objective’ interpretation and appreciation of the text. (Bury, 2007: 303)

Landscapes and assemblage points of reading

Largely it was this particular understanding of the nature of immersive affective reading that inspired me to use the metaphor of an emotional landscape to describe popular fan fiction reading strategies. This metaphor seems apt in conveying the relationship between a fandom reader and texts; it may also prove useful for a conversation about reader reception in other spheres of popular culture. The landscape metaphor allows me to place emphasis on the reader facing both an endless variety of fan fiction texts potentially capable of satisfying every need and demand, and every single text, which she must go through on her affective itinerary. Of course, a text has plenty of opportunities to influence this itinerary, but that is not what concerns me now. How the reader maps the route is the real question: the reader who may have personally commissioned this text from a fandom writer, or waited for it for months, all while cheering the author on with friendly comments, – or simply a reader, with her own assortment of needs and demands on fandom reading. What strategies does someone accustomed to extensive, emotional, subjective and simultaneously intense, multifunctional reading employ in the process of mastering and internalizing the text?

In conjunction with emotional landscapes of reading, I would like to note that my metaphor builds on the contemporary concept of performativity of landscape in phenomenological theories of space, in sociology and geography. A landscape, whether urban or natural, is not conceived as extraneous to an observer. The way, in which phenomenology of landscape interprets the role of an observer and a participant of movement through the landscape, matches exactly the way, in which I would describe the role of an emotionally affected reader who preconditions the development of a text and assembles it around the points of her personal interest. As John Wylie writes in his chapter ‘Spatialities of feeling’, reviewing phenomenological theories of space:

For Merleau-Ponty, landscape is not a way of seeing: the term refers instead to the materialities and sensibilities with which we see…. When I look, I see with landscape. I am neither looking at it, nor straightforwardly placed ‘inside’ it. I am intertwined instead within an unfolding differentiation. To put this perceptually, I perceive through an attunement with landscape. (Wylie, 2007: 152)

Sociology of space conceptualizes the relationship between the subject and the landscape in a similar manner. Sociologist Andrea Brighenti describes one of the major participants of a modern urban scene – the flâneur: ‘The flaneur is not a person but a diagram of affections, a recorder of the territorialities, combinations, variations and stratifications in the urban environment’ (Brighenti, 2010: 135). Likewise a contemporary reader, especially a fan fiction reader, who aims to use a text primarily as an emotional instrument, is ‘inscribed’ in this text ‘like a diagram of affections’; all she has to do in picking texts and reading them is to recognize these personally preferable territories. She is performing her desired itinerary through the emotional landscape of reading. It may look like a rollercoaster (these are in a high demand) or, possibly, a tough road with a cosy little cabin at the end, or an easy and pleasant walk downhill. Let us not multiply metaphors further, but instead look at some reading strategies common among the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction readers to examine several noteworthy assemblage points of fandom reading which fully reveal its peculiarities. This is far from being a full list, and I doubt that cataloguing them all is even feasible. These points should at least help initiate a conversation about fan fiction texts in their specific reading habitat.

Conclusion

In the present article, an attempt was made to propose approaches to studying common reading strategies as practised by the ‘impatient communities’ of fan fiction readers and writers, and to map out a provisional and a priori incomplete map of emotional landscapes of reading this type of contemporary literature. While remaining marginal from the standpoint of dominant literary institutions, these contemporary public spheres of the imagination, with their own strategies and norms, rules for discussions and laws of development, are growing and will continue to grow with every generation of internet users. They are in highest demand by many categories of readers. The study of contemporary reading strategies must not fail to consider this circumstance.