(very) brief meta point
Feb. 11th, 2009 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseTangentially jumping off of a topic on narrative friendship at fangs, fur, & fey -
It's a mistake, I think, to see all fannish involvement with a text as somehow indicative of what fen want that text to be. Ficcing a pairing doesn't mean you want them together in canon - although it can mean that, of course - so much as it means that you see an interesting possible story in their hooking up. Fanwriting is spidery. Unlike prowriting, it doesn't per se drive toward a goal narrative.
This is negative capability with a vengeance - no irritable grasping, just flinging webs of possible, divergent stories. Ideally unprivileged? Like some sort of pornographic quantum event, where everything is everywhere at once until we look straight at it, and becomes so once again after we look away.
It's a mistake, I think, to see all fannish involvement with a text as somehow indicative of what fen want that text to be. Ficcing a pairing doesn't mean you want them together in canon - although it can mean that, of course - so much as it means that you see an interesting possible story in their hooking up. Fanwriting is spidery. Unlike prowriting, it doesn't per se drive toward a goal narrative.
This is negative capability with a vengeance - no irritable grasping, just flinging webs of possible, divergent stories. Ideally unprivileged? Like some sort of pornographic quantum event, where everything is everywhere at once until we look straight at it, and becomes so once again after we look away.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 05:08 pm (UTC)Does anyone in LJ Fandom go to the theater, ballet, or opera? Where part of the fun is the different casts interpreting the same "text". Then there is how different theatrical traditions affect the casts' performance of the original "text". The ability for people to accept and compare different theatrical interpretations has been around for a long time outside of academia.
Apparently in the 1800's some producers "restored" the happy ending to King Lear justifying it on the basis the source story Shakespeare used had Lear return to his throne and reconciliated with Cordelia. The Soviets did a similar change to the ending of Swan Lake.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 08:49 pm (UTC)I've actually written kind of lot on this wrt theater and oral literature - I wrote my thesis on fairytales, which are all about reinterpretation. If you check along my tags, I've posted some ideas on multiplicity in Shakespeare specifically.
(and seriously, that Victorian Lear is cracked out omg)