Call for Papers: Reading Fanfiction/ Fanfiction Reading

Fanfiction can be many things: an interpretation of the source text, an insight into a fandom culture, or an exemplar of popular narrative tropes and themes. But fannish stories are also, always, works of fiction, and they reward in-depth analysis as much as any other work of literature. 

In Reading Fanfiction/Fanfiction Readings, we aim to put together a collection of essays in which we treat fan fiction as an important form of contemporary literature, using the tools of close reading: focus on the author’s use of language, imagery, and theme. This project calls to all of us who have  discussed a story for hours (or over many comments or DMs), or who have a story that we rec to friends who don’t know the fandom or the characters, because it just has that much to offer, or who have a story we come back to long after we’ve moved on to another fandom, a story that we have analyzed in passing but feel it deserved an article of its own. If you love close textual readings and love fan fiction and have a story that says and means so much more, we want your contribution!

Blogging at Fanhackers

Hi - doing something new at OTW, blogging for Fanhackers. Hopefully on Sundays (more or less.)  Gonna try to be here more too. 

Intro post here: https://tmblr.co/ZxUk-td-mhNUum00

Call for papers on The Dark Fantastic

I don’t normally post CFP, but this seemed like an interesting collection: Liverpool University’s journal Science Fiction Film & Television is seeking essays for a forthcoming special issue dedicated to thinking about Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s book, The Dark Fantastic.  The issue intends to pay specific attention to Black girl protagonists in science fiction and film, and invites “contributions that engage meaningfully with the key concepts, methods, and proposals from The Dark Fantastic.” Abstracts are due May 31; more information can be found here:https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/documents/Journals/sfftv_Black%20Fantastic%20CFP-1682698592.pdf

THE GREATEST is long, fast-cut vid not only made up entirely of characters of color (hundreds of them!) but the kind of wildly heroic genre fiction characters that fandom loves... It is 4:27 minutes of fabulous power walks, hero shots, bold looks, and big emotions, with characters of color finally getting, en masse, to experience the wonders of saving the world and exploring the universe. There is also love: bironic ends the vid with a montage of hugs and kisses, loving families and sexy relationships, het and slash. Bironic also released the vid with a subtitle track that identifies the characters and shows, so the vid also functions as a recruiter vid for stories featuring diverse characters.

Read more of Vidding: A History (@UofMPress, 2022) at: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/hq37vq792

TO TOUCH THE FACE OF GOD is a vid about the space program, and Destina uses the classical/epic music of E. S. Posthumus to invoke emotions like awe and humility at images too often used as mere backdrops for comic book violence: earth, the moon, the surfaces of other planets, rocket ships, the star field. TO TOUCH THE FACE OF GOD uses both real and cinematic footage to narrate mankind’s desire for flight, moving us from Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier through the various Mercury and Apollo missions to the achievement of the moon. The vid is, to quote Destina, “a tribute to manned space flight, and to the sometimes unheralded dreamers, technicians, engineers, science geeks, and support staff (and test pilots) who made it possible.” 

Read more of Vidding: A History (@UofMPress, 2022) at: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/hq37vq792

In PAUL MCCARTNEY, jarrow edits footage from Will & Grace so that the characters bounce and gyrate, gesticulate, snap, and boogie together.

There is joy in creating and observing these kinds of patterns. As jarrow recollects, “I decided to start by grouping similar clips together (fainting, victorious arm pumps, hugs and kisses, gasping in shock, dances, etc.) and see if I could make sense of it. . . . When I was rewatching the episodes, I grabbed interesting motion-y bits with absolutely no idea that they would be paralleled later (by other characters or themselves). It was such a delightful surprise to end up with something like twenty different clumps of paralleled motion.”

Read more of Vidding: A History (U Michigan Press, 2022) at: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/hq37vq792

*waves arms in the air wildly*. It took ten years to write, but here it is finally both in print and in a free to read, expanded, online edition with vids and art included!  Read it here: https://t.co/KU1fjBjLGG!! 

Three vids by three master vidders (all of whom are discussed in my forthcoming book, Vidding: A History.) Three different styles, three different stories, three different aesthetics.  My book is already in press or OMG, is there a chapter right here!  (I might write a mini essay on each of these, actually; they’re each so brilliant in their own way.)  WATCH AND ENJOY.  

And now....for my next trick! :D.  Forthcoming!  (They’re building it!) (It’s going to be free to read!) (It’s got vids embedded!) (It features so many amazing vidders!)  

I realize I didn’t reblog this here - this is the other side of my career - but it occurs to me that some of you might be willing to donate toward putting up a statue of gay, working class playwright Joe Orton.  Orton’s career is a mess of defiance and criminality and fuck-the-system bravado and problematic sexual tourism and sparkling wit, but he was defiant and unashamed at a moment when that was a damn near impossible thing to be. They didn’t call him the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State Gentility for nothing, and Wilde’s got a statue! Plus Ian McKellen is on the team, as is Stephen Fry and Kenneth Cranham and Alec Baldwin and a lot of other fan favorites who have played Orton roles over the years (including David Tennant, who played Nick in What the Butler Saw.)

Co-founded by English Professor Francesca Coppa, the site is a community for artists, a fan-built social network and a female-designed and -led software project.