Fanfiction, like any genre, is really a conversation more than a set of formal constraints, but if e.g. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead had been just slightly more erotic it would be unmistakably at home on AO3. As the mid-60s publication date of Stoppard's play suggests, this fad for "rewriting the classics" (which you've remarked on a couple of times, and which seems to have intensified in the 21st century) seems to track the emergence of fanfiction as a modern genre (I think people were putting spirk in primitive zines by the late 60s); and I guess the general condition of postmodernity underlies both developments. It wouldn't be at all surprising if by the 2010s or even 2000s there was already some subterranean cross-pollination between the two traditions, imo.
Thanks, that makes sense. Even some popular books of the last few decades that have no obvious fanfiction element can have the vibe, like The Secret History or (this one I know mostly by reputation) A Little Life.
That’s an interesting essay, I share your slight skepticism but think it hits really well on how literary fiction hasn’t been able to assimilate online culture and 21st century mass media. I understand why there was a turn against hysterical realism, but that stuff is I think more true to life in a connected world than actually internet and 21st century low culture influenced anhedonic adderalled out fiction we’ve had so far. Fanfiction is probably the wrong way out, although at least she recognizes there’s a problem. Then again, I suppose we could accuse Thomas Mann of writing Bible fanfiction or John Barth of writing 17th century English poetry fanfiction!
Thanks, this is how I've come to see it too. You can get there *through* autofictional techniques—this is sort of what Joyce did in the early 20th century, and Mitchell and Lin have done it in our century—but big-canvas novels are good too. I don't know if fanfiction is right or wrong, just that I'm not going to read it (though I sort of did write some in Major Arcana, which contains my Superman story to end all Superman stories, a story of which I have had some intimations since my age was in the single digits). But the way she describes it reminds me of pre-modernist fiction more than post-: a Victorian novel where a chapter begins with a long title, a fake Shakespearean epigraph, a description of coal mining with allusions to Milton and to Parliamentary inquiries, then a paragraph of Yorkshire dialect, with a dizzily busy illustration on the facing page.
Well, part of Woods prosecution for the big pomo novel was that it was all descended from Dickens anyhow! But I see your point. I’m interested to see the shape of MA continue to evolve-I like to read it four or five chapters at a time, so I’m perpetually behind on it!
To footnote 4, I would add the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey: his blinding is both terrifying and thrilling at the same time, like something in a comic book, or Beowulf.
Fanfiction, like any genre, is really a conversation more than a set of formal constraints, but if e.g. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead had been just slightly more erotic it would be unmistakably at home on AO3. As the mid-60s publication date of Stoppard's play suggests, this fad for "rewriting the classics" (which you've remarked on a couple of times, and which seems to have intensified in the 21st century) seems to track the emergence of fanfiction as a modern genre (I think people were putting spirk in primitive zines by the late 60s); and I guess the general condition of postmodernity underlies both developments. It wouldn't be at all surprising if by the 2010s or even 2000s there was already some subterranean cross-pollination between the two traditions, imo.
Thanks, that makes sense. Even some popular books of the last few decades that have no obvious fanfiction element can have the vibe, like The Secret History or (this one I know mostly by reputation) A Little Life.
That’s an interesting essay, I share your slight skepticism but think it hits really well on how literary fiction hasn’t been able to assimilate online culture and 21st century mass media. I understand why there was a turn against hysterical realism, but that stuff is I think more true to life in a connected world than actually internet and 21st century low culture influenced anhedonic adderalled out fiction we’ve had so far. Fanfiction is probably the wrong way out, although at least she recognizes there’s a problem. Then again, I suppose we could accuse Thomas Mann of writing Bible fanfiction or John Barth of writing 17th century English poetry fanfiction!
Thanks, this is how I've come to see it too. You can get there *through* autofictional techniques—this is sort of what Joyce did in the early 20th century, and Mitchell and Lin have done it in our century—but big-canvas novels are good too. I don't know if fanfiction is right or wrong, just that I'm not going to read it (though I sort of did write some in Major Arcana, which contains my Superman story to end all Superman stories, a story of which I have had some intimations since my age was in the single digits). But the way she describes it reminds me of pre-modernist fiction more than post-: a Victorian novel where a chapter begins with a long title, a fake Shakespearean epigraph, a description of coal mining with allusions to Milton and to Parliamentary inquiries, then a paragraph of Yorkshire dialect, with a dizzily busy illustration on the facing page.
Well, part of Woods prosecution for the big pomo novel was that it was all descended from Dickens anyhow! But I see your point. I’m interested to see the shape of MA continue to evolve-I like to read it four or five chapters at a time, so I’m perpetually behind on it!
Brilliant. Is there a word for a form of writing in which the footnotes and non-footnotes are more or less perfectly balanced?
Thank you! If there is, I don't know it.
To footnote 4, I would add the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey: his blinding is both terrifying and thrilling at the same time, like something in a comic book, or Beowulf.