Beyond (the) Canon: Reading Fanfiction as Literature

If Shakespeare collects his ideas from all sides, then that is “genius” and he is one of the “most important poets in world literature”. Nowadays, when fans take inspiration from existing works to create new texts and publish them on the Internet, that is “fanfiction” and is even worse than adaptations, which, as we all know, are never as good as the original anyway.

This is obviously an exaggeration. And yet, there still is a suspicious lack of research on a massive corpus of texts that is accessible free of charge from almost everywhere. This seminar is a small step to close that gap while also engaging with literary form through contemporary texts. We will begin by clarifying some basic questions – what is fanfiction and how is it (not) adaptation? What cultural work do fanfictions do and how is that representative of literature in general? We will also look at various common tropes and genres and discuss topics such as the representation of gender, race or disability in fanfiction. Participants are welcome to contribute examples – parts of the final schedule and the respective primary texts will be compiled together.