When Readers Become Writers: Fanfiction in the Archive
Sometimes we read a story so gripping that we wish we could continue reading forever – or one so objectionable that we would like nothing more than to reach right into it and fix it. Fanfictions make both possible. The only limit is one’s own imagination.
Initially an offline phenomenon, stories exchanged via post or magazines printed by fans themselves (so-called fanzines), the medium of fanfiction increasingly migrated into the internet. Fanfiction offers an ideal venue for both the study of acts of reading as well as of acts of writing. It is not only creative, derivative, collaborative, and interactive, but also subversive: both love letter to and resistance against the original.
The stories and authors collected by the German Literature Archive are no exception to fanfiction’s seemingly ubiquitous presence: Here, a fan retells Hesse’s Demian, there, the friendship between Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is, in fact, a love story. Fanfiction offers an opportunity to approach old, well-known texts from a new perspective and to make them approachable in turn – and not only for a younger audience. Through its creative handling of existing source texts, fanfiction as a medium is of interest to the DLA.
This is the context in which the project »When Readers Become Writers: Fanfiction in the Archive« is situated. It encompasses a crowdsourcing platform for practical projects, a workshop on the topic of fanfiction, as well as an archival approach. The concept of fanfiction is thus captured in all its facets: as a social, collaborative, subversive praxis in constant flux.
The majority of fanfiction consumers and producers is young. Over 78% of the 7.7 million users of Archive of Our Own are below 35. Especially in times when the reading habits of younger generations are often a topic of discussion, it is all the more relevant to examine how young readers approach and interact with literature. Fanfiction opens up new ways of thinking about reading as well as writing, and further allows for a special focus on those moments where the two intersect.
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