Fanfic in Ireland: No Country, No Sex, No Money, No Name

Abstract

Fanfic, short for fan fiction, is fiction that takes popular television series, films, comic books, famous people and popular fiction as its starting point. Produced by fans of the original texts for other fans and, today, largely published on the internet, fanfic appears to erase the distinction between reader/writer. Fans take literally the poststructuralist view that every reader already rewrites a favoured text and makes it her own. It is not simply that those who, in the words of Roland Barthes, are not ‘intimidated by the censorship implicit in literal meanings’ identify the non-hierarchical plurality of allusions in texts; more than this, fan writers work on the assumption that the original author-generator has long been dead.2 In fanfic, the cultural ‘consumer’ becomes subcultural producer, as fanfic irrevocably alters the perception of its source material, urging the reader to perform radical interventions each time she confronts an original text. According to John Fiske, all popular texts require the active participation of the reader,3 but fanfic has an unprecedented effect: what Henry Jenkins refers to as ‘encouraging viewer activism’.4KeywordsPopular CultureOriginal TextComic BookPersonal CorrespondenceTelevision SeriesThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.