#annejamison

Also - and I've been meaning to respond to this for ages but let's do it here - I was interested in how firmly you drew the dividing line in this response (which was fascinating so thank you) between emotive/catharsis fic vs 'literary' fic which you frame as more logical and argumentative (about exploring a point of view rather than working through an emotion). Surely the lines are a lot more blurred? When I read and enjoy a work of literature it's not primarily an analytical experience, most of the time; it's much more about the emotional response that the text evokes in me. That doesn't mean that I can't admire something that's deftly written or clever or thought-provoking, just that the emotional level is always present and often at the forefront. This isn’t necessarily different in fic. I think a lot of ‘literary’ fic is absolutely working with an emotional goal in mind.

I was thinking about this because in general the role of emotion in literature is another thing that really interests me, particularly in the context I guess of an academic response - why it's more sort of academically respectable to talk about literature in a dispassionate way than it is to discuss its affective impact on us. Literature - it seems to me - is so much about emotion, and exploring emotion, and getting an empathetic sense of other people's experiences which is inevitably largely emotional in nature just because that's how we interact with the world, that the idea of having to neatly separate off our emotional responses to it in order to provide a 'serious' reading is... well, I think it's another reflection of the idea that there's a proper audience for literature and a proper way to read it and anything outside that is less or wrong. That's not me personally getting at you, btw, no way, I'm just... thinking about it.

To clarify that last point; what you see a lot of in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century is educated male elites getting twitchy about the new audiences coming to printed texts (specifically women and the working class), and the way they sort of tried to exclude these audiences from the debate was to characterise them as very emotional readers who couldn't control their responses to literature. This made them vulnerable to bad influences and demanded that the existing elites take a sort of supervisory role, choosing which texts were suitable for these audiences to consume in order to ensure that they didn't come to harm from reading texts that were too ~exciting (politically, sexually). So of course one response to that is for these audiences to sort of haul themselves up and demonstrate that they can participate in cultural debate in the same detached dispassionate way as the male elite supposedly does already. But the other way is to query that whole premise by pointing out that actually, that's nonsense. Nobody's response to literature or art is devoid of emotion and if it IS devoid of emotion then it's a very narrow, limited kind of response to have. In the C19 a lot of these debates are framed around pornography and people's access to it - it's okay for rich men to look at things which wouldn't be suitable for women or the working class. (Think about the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial - this was a book that got banned in the UK in the 1920s - famously the barrister for the prosecution asked the jury if this was a novel they would be happy for their 'wives or servants' to read.) The justification for that is that these men can be detached, scientific, whatever in their responses. But that's obviously disingenuous when the whole point of porn is the emotional/physical response it provokes.

So I suppose from the course of doing the PhD, what I’ve come to is sort of... a skepticism about the way that an education in literary criticism can often encourage us to respond to what we read. I think it misses out some key elements of what literature does and I think there are sort of palpable reasons for the approach it takes which are founded in outdated models of literary interaction that try and dictate who readers ought to be and how texts ought to go about their business. And I find it more fun, if sometimes more work, to try and do something closer to what I’ve seen called ‘reparative reading’, where you try and build a set of standards that are particular to a certain type or genre of text. And in the context of fanfiction in particular, I think this is relevant because this is a genre written largely by and for a marginalised audience and so there’s an absolutely direct comparison to the kinds of material I was looking at from the nineteenth century.