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Four years later
Nov. 6th, 2011 02:07 pmI've finally made my dissertation available online. It's four years after I promised I'd do anything with it but it's the thought that counts, right?
The Literary and Academic Claims of Fan Fiction and Fan Meta - The 2011 Remix
Introduction to an Introduction
The year was 2007, Snape had killed Dumbledore, LiveJournal was still cool, I was young, pretentious and in my final year of University. I was working on a dissertation, which I hoped would keep my interest (and have a reasonable amount of secondary source material) while being sufficiently obscure that my tutors wouldn’t mark it too harshly. It was handed in two months before the release of Deathly Hallows and driven in part by the feeling of pre-emptive nostalgia for the biggest fandom in existence at that time. All our years of theorising and fixation, late night conversations and midnight releases and threaded through all of this was the internet; the technology which made it possible for all of us to scream into the void about our loves and hatreds and longings and how adults just didn’t understand and have other people yell back. The first time I realised that I could go online and find people who cared about the things that I cared about whether that was painting my bedroom black (my parents were so cruel!) or Harry Potter.
And so my dissertation was written, or to be more precise, slowly dragged out of me over the course of a year while I complained frequently online about what I had and had not written. Some of this was typed up in a frenzy of desperation on my laptop during Whitby Gothic Weekend. My original outline for this piece would have split it in two, one focusing on Harry Potter fandom and another on fan fiction resulting from the movie adaptation of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and how that secondary interpretation of the text affected fan responses. Sadly by the time I’d written even half of this I realised that it wouldn’t match the original word count of 10,000.
I promised any number of people that once University was over I would put it online for posterity after I’d finished some secondary editing but Deathly Hallows came and went and then I had a full time job and what with one thing and other the years have slipped away. It wasn’t until DiaCon Alley this year that I seriously started thinking about reworking it, when I went back to the original version I was slightly embarrassed to see some of the rookie errors I had made despite receiving 2:1 so I suspect I just set higher standards for myself nowadays. This is not the University copy of my dissertation, this is the 2011 remix written with the benefit of hindsight, another book, access to secondary canon and another stack of late night conversations from some wonderful friends.
The 2011 remix is dedicated to Maddie Plum and Emily Duranorak who suffered through editing the first version and everyone who made DiaCon Alley possible and reminded me why we were so excited about all this in the first place.
The Literary and Academic Claims of Fan Fiction and Fan Meta - The 2011 Remix
The year was 2007, Snape had killed Dumbledore, LiveJournal was still cool, I was young, pretentious and in my final year of University. I was working on a dissertation, which I hoped would keep my interest (and have a reasonable amount of secondary source material) while being sufficiently obscure that my tutors wouldn’t mark it too harshly. It was handed in two months before the release of Deathly Hallows and driven in part by the feeling of pre-emptive nostalgia for the biggest fandom in existence at that time. All our years of theorising and fixation, late night conversations and midnight releases and threaded through all of this was the internet; the technology which made it possible for all of us to scream into the void about our loves and hatreds and longings and how adults just didn’t understand and have other people yell back. The first time I realised that I could go online and find people who cared about the things that I cared about whether that was painting my bedroom black (my parents were so cruel!) or Harry Potter.
And so my dissertation was written, or to be more precise, slowly dragged out of me over the course of a year while I complained frequently online about what I had and had not written. Some of this was typed up in a frenzy of desperation on my laptop during Whitby Gothic Weekend. My original outline for this piece would have split it in two, one focusing on Harry Potter fandom and another on fan fiction resulting from the movie adaptation of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and how that secondary interpretation of the text affected fan responses. Sadly by the time I’d written even half of this I realised that it wouldn’t match the original word count of 10,000.
I promised any number of people that once University was over I would put it online for posterity after I’d finished some secondary editing but Deathly Hallows came and went and then I had a full time job and what with one thing and other the years have slipped away. It wasn’t until DiaCon Alley this year that I seriously started thinking about reworking it, when I went back to the original version I was slightly embarrassed to see some of the rookie errors I had made despite receiving 2:1 so I suspect I just set higher standards for myself nowadays. This is not the University copy of my dissertation, this is the 2011 remix written with the benefit of hindsight, another book, access to secondary canon and another stack of late night conversations from some wonderful friends.
The 2011 remix is dedicated to Maddie Plum and Emily Duranorak who suffered through editing the first version and everyone who made DiaCon Alley possible and reminded me why we were so excited about all this in the first place.
