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this is sort of productive kind of
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allothi, almostinstinct, briar_pipe, not_sally, and stealingpennies! <333 \o/
You know howpenknife made an SGA starter kit for people who want to get into the show but maybe don’t want to watch the zillion episodes already out? Is there something like this for Supernatural?
Speaking of TV, how about The Office and how I couldn’t finish watching the “Scott’s Tots” episode, argh. I love The Office to bits but this episode was so painful and terrible D-:
To help me think my anthropology final through, under this cut is a discussion of
The problem with my spiel on destiny and identity in Narnia is pretty well-articulated by this recent Missives from Marx post. It’s the primary roadblock between my approach to fannishly overanalyzing Narnia/Merlin/whatever and how I can actually make this flailing a viable academic paper. When I flail about it online, it’s always about “how the characters in the text advance a social agenda within the plot of the text itself” because that’s what I’m interested in as a fic writer. But I reckon my professor would probably prefer an analysis of the relationship between the text and the reader/audience.
There’s a couple of ways I can approach this.
In the case of Narnia, my impulse is to appropriate Susan Pevensie’s POV as the reader/audience’s POV i.e. our POV. The link between Susan and us is that of the rationalism and disenchantment associated with adulthood. So, whenever I write ‘the reader/audience’, I can pretend it’s fanon Susan. This is the more fun approach.
My secondary impulse is to talk about Narnia fandom. About you guys! About us! How do we relate to the text? Why do we engage with it the way we do? And we have an agenda. We criticize Lewis’s Christian moralizing and of-the-era misogyny, and we rescue Susan from judgment, we rescue colonial stories from being narrativized into a romanticized tale of victory and conquest, and we take back life from death when, during The Last Battle, life is declared to be inferior to death.
However, I am intrigued bycaramelsilver’s assertion that there are two Narnia fandoms: one that is primarily bookverse in which Lewis’s image of Narnia as a pastoral idyll is perpetuated, which chills out over at fanfiction.net; and one that I’ve already described in the previous paragraph in which the fantasy is rationalized and critiqued, chilling out primarily on Livejournal (and Skyhawke and AO3?). Perhaps this can be my question in my paper: what does this splinter signify? What is at stake? Then I bring out the big guns about subjectification, identity, internalization, and the subaltern. Why are their agendas different and how are they the same? What draws these fans together and what instigates their self-enclosure in a subsection of fandom? Hmm, this is not to say that the first and second groups of Narnia fen are mutually exclusive.
I started reading Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction because I’m the kind of dork who reads JSTOR articles for fun. Gilead refers to fantasy stories where the protagonists are whisked off to a magical world Other to our own, and she identifies 3 ways that these stories end:
1) The return to the ‘real world’ justifies the foray into the fantasy world as necessary to the spiritual/emotional/mental growth that the children will need in the non-fantasy world e.g. Baum’s Wizard of Oz and Maurice Sendak’s picture books.
2) The return to the real world dismisses and belittles the fantasy world by treating it sentimentally. The return tends to come as an interruption than as a resolution e.g. Carroll’s Alice books.
3) The return does not justify nor dismiss the fantasy, thus “fostering a neurotic avoidance of social and psychic realities” (Gilead 278) e.g. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
#1 is what Lewis seems to think Narnia is, and what the first group of fen on ffnet perpetuates. #3 is what Narnia actually is. Alternatively, #3 is how the second group of fen interpret Narnia (and I’m obviously part of this group, so). (Just for fun, #2 is how Susan interprets Narnia.) One can of course postulate other ways that these stories end. In her endnotes, Gilead brings up the idea that the closure in Narnia stories are actually none of the above and end with – #4 – the absence of expected return. What this means, she does not elaborate. Also intriguing is the idea of evaluating the series of returns and closures in the whole Chronicles.
And then at this point I usually think, okay, this is all well and good, but how can I tie this back to my readings mythology and ideology? To individuation within and without the group? To conditions of production? To structuralism and poststructuralism and empiricism and imperialism and yaddayaddablahblah-ism and cultural formation? That’s the fucking thing about anthropology, everything is one big amorphous blob. I think what is key is not losing sight of the reader’s relationship with the text, and this can happen by discussing a number of things: the adult/child dichotomy, the reality/fantasy divide, the id/superego conflict, and whether rationalism and innocence are mutually exclusive terms. Maybe I should just write ‘the reader’ when I actually mean Susan. Sure I’d be projecting, but what academic isn’t?
Apparently what I want to do for my final paper is to paraphrase Gilead’s article, but to also include Narnia and Narnia fandom.
Or, I can just write my final paper about fandom in general, or maybe ‘Merlin’ fandom specifically! Hoo man, ideology and mythology in ‘Merlin’ fandom, that is a completely different post.
Randomly, I miss watching Ocean Girl :(. WHERE ARE YOU, OCEAN GIRL SEASON 4.
ETA: Hilarious vid rec of the whenever!: Arthur in the Afternoon. "A dazzling tribute to Arthur Pendragon and his amazing wooing skills. Or, an incisive exploration of the increasingly shameless objectification of Bradley James by the British Broadcasting Corporation."
allothi, almostinstinct, briar_pipe, not_sally, and stealingpennies! <333 \o/You know how
penknife made an SGA starter kit for people who want to get into the show but maybe don’t want to watch the zillion episodes already out? Is there something like this for Supernatural?Speaking of TV, how about The Office and how I couldn’t finish watching the “Scott’s Tots” episode, argh. I love The Office to bits but this episode was so painful and terrible D-:
To help me think my anthropology final through, under this cut is a discussion of
The problem with my spiel on destiny and identity in Narnia is pretty well-articulated by this recent Missives from Marx post. It’s the primary roadblock between my approach to fannishly overanalyzing Narnia/Merlin/whatever and how I can actually make this flailing a viable academic paper. When I flail about it online, it’s always about “how the characters in the text advance a social agenda within the plot of the text itself” because that’s what I’m interested in as a fic writer. But I reckon my professor would probably prefer an analysis of the relationship between the text and the reader/audience.
There’s a couple of ways I can approach this.
In the case of Narnia, my impulse is to appropriate Susan Pevensie’s POV as the reader/audience’s POV i.e. our POV. The link between Susan and us is that of the rationalism and disenchantment associated with adulthood. So, whenever I write ‘the reader/audience’, I can pretend it’s fanon Susan. This is the more fun approach.
My secondary impulse is to talk about Narnia fandom. About you guys! About us! How do we relate to the text? Why do we engage with it the way we do? And we have an agenda. We criticize Lewis’s Christian moralizing and of-the-era misogyny, and we rescue Susan from judgment, we rescue colonial stories from being narrativized into a romanticized tale of victory and conquest, and we take back life from death when, during The Last Battle, life is declared to be inferior to death.
However, I am intrigued by
caramelsilver’s assertion that there are two Narnia fandoms: one that is primarily bookverse in which Lewis’s image of Narnia as a pastoral idyll is perpetuated, which chills out over at fanfiction.net; and one that I’ve already described in the previous paragraph in which the fantasy is rationalized and critiqued, chilling out primarily on Livejournal (and Skyhawke and AO3?). Perhaps this can be my question in my paper: what does this splinter signify? What is at stake? Then I bring out the big guns about subjectification, identity, internalization, and the subaltern. Why are their agendas different and how are they the same? What draws these fans together and what instigates their self-enclosure in a subsection of fandom? Hmm, this is not to say that the first and second groups of Narnia fen are mutually exclusive.I started reading Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction because I’m the kind of dork who reads JSTOR articles for fun. Gilead refers to fantasy stories where the protagonists are whisked off to a magical world Other to our own, and she identifies 3 ways that these stories end:
1) The return to the ‘real world’ justifies the foray into the fantasy world as necessary to the spiritual/emotional/mental growth that the children will need in the non-fantasy world e.g. Baum’s Wizard of Oz and Maurice Sendak’s picture books.
2) The return to the real world dismisses and belittles the fantasy world by treating it sentimentally. The return tends to come as an interruption than as a resolution e.g. Carroll’s Alice books.
3) The return does not justify nor dismiss the fantasy, thus “fostering a neurotic avoidance of social and psychic realities” (Gilead 278) e.g. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
#1 is what Lewis seems to think Narnia is, and what the first group of fen on ffnet perpetuates. #3 is what Narnia actually is. Alternatively, #3 is how the second group of fen interpret Narnia (and I’m obviously part of this group, so). (Just for fun, #2 is how Susan interprets Narnia.) One can of course postulate other ways that these stories end. In her endnotes, Gilead brings up the idea that the closure in Narnia stories are actually none of the above and end with – #4 – the absence of expected return. What this means, she does not elaborate. Also intriguing is the idea of evaluating the series of returns and closures in the whole Chronicles.
And then at this point I usually think, okay, this is all well and good, but how can I tie this back to my readings mythology and ideology? To individuation within and without the group? To conditions of production? To structuralism and poststructuralism and empiricism and imperialism and yaddayaddablahblah-ism and cultural formation? That’s the fucking thing about anthropology, everything is one big amorphous blob. I think what is key is not losing sight of the reader’s relationship with the text, and this can happen by discussing a number of things: the adult/child dichotomy, the reality/fantasy divide, the id/superego conflict, and whether rationalism and innocence are mutually exclusive terms. Maybe I should just write ‘the reader’ when I actually mean Susan. Sure I’d be projecting, but what academic isn’t?
Apparently what I want to do for my final paper is to paraphrase Gilead’s article, but to also include Narnia and Narnia fandom.
Or, I can just write my final paper about fandom in general, or maybe ‘Merlin’ fandom specifically! Hoo man, ideology and mythology in ‘Merlin’ fandom, that is a completely different post.
Randomly, I miss watching Ocean Girl :(. WHERE ARE YOU, OCEAN GIRL SEASON 4.
ETA: Hilarious vid rec of the whenever!: Arthur in the Afternoon. "A dazzling tribute to Arthur Pendragon and his amazing wooing skills. Or, an incisive exploration of the increasingly shameless objectification of Bradley James by the British Broadcasting Corporation."
no subject
trufax, the Pevensies never get to return to anything. Return is the TRAGIC LIE. All Pevensies do is move forward ever onward!
POSTNARNIA. OH MY PANZER WE ARE TOTALLY THAT KID omg lolz <3333333 \o/
When the Gilead article talks about the reader/audience, it totally sounds like she's talking about Susan, which was how I got the idea. And hey why not, because if Susan is the reader, and I identify with Susan, AND I'm also the one writing the essay, then HEY trifecta! Everything is a symbol for everything else, and SUBJECTIVITY IS A LIE and apparently not an option here hahahaha. But we won't tell my professor. But somehow the paper would be Susan's observations on herself as she reads the story of her life. IS THAT MY PAPER OR IS IT FIC? This class is a total trip.
I don't know about the story of Merlin itself, because I think if I were going to take on the Arthurian legends, I'd have to account for the billions of retellings. I am no Arthurian scholar. But what IS interesting is Merlin fandom itself! How the fandom becomes an arena for the reclamation/discussion of the subaltern! I have never been in a fandom like Merlin before. I'm just like O_O sometimes! On top of everything else, everyone is so hyperaware (or at least hyperconcerned) of the race/gender implications in the narrative, and everyone is all about EMPOWERMENT. I mean, you wanna talk about emotional investment? Everybody wants to write empowering stories with happy payoffs all the effing time! Seriously, before 'Merlin' came along, my default writing mood was ~dark~, but then 'Merlin' fandom came along and was like, "Lighten up! Let's have a gender party instead! Whee, gender! Empowerment yay!" Then it threw some glitter on me and danced a jig, I swear.
no subject
they do, just like in LB! Further up and further in! but, like freud says, all we really want to do is regress to childhood.
XDDD oh man, we are that kid, and do you know what? I love it. rock on, us :D
But somehow the paper would be Susan's observations on herself as she reads the story of her life. IS THAT MY PAPER OR IS IT FIC?
Let's call it meta, and let's remember that all meta is really an essay :D
Can I ask, also, what is the subaltern? I wiki'd it and felt satisfied but now I just put the term in my essay and I don't want to have it wrong. it's someone who's totally excluded by cultural hegemony, right? someone who has no power or voice in it and can't possibly ever? oddly enough I'm writing about subjectivity. sometimes I wonder if you should be writing about postcolonialism and literature as an academic because it so makes me think of you.
YES wow you've hit it on the head! Empowerment! And I think it's totally a reaction against the show's 1) focus on destiny, but more importantly, 2) already-determined-bad-end: things are going to be tragic, right, and Arthur's pretty much gonna die. fans want to change things and in this case we have to convince ourselves that we have control of our own futures, that we have power that can be used for good and the same goes for Morgana, that Uther/the Man will not triumph, and that Arthur is not going to be Uther / progress is real and revolution is possible.
But you're right, geez, Merlin's the most intentionally happy fandom ever. wow.
no subject
Yes, the subaltern is that. FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION HAVING NO VOICE, because the article I was reading about it (quite short, 5 pages) is Can the Subaltern Speak? (http://dspace.library.uu.nl:8080/bitstream/1874/29948/1/scan011.2.pdf). The subaltern are victims of epistemic violence. Their stories are written by their oppressors. "The terms 'people' and 'subaltern classes' [are] used as synonymous throughout [Guha's definition]. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total population and all those whom we have described to be 'elite'."
SOMETIMES I WONDER TOO, but then would I start to hate it, because it is no longer a hobby, but WORK? I do wonder if I get my PhD, if I'd get it in, like, international development, or if I'll go in for comparative literature or some crap. I hear there is a grad program at Harvard about FOLKLORE. *grabby hands*
It's totally reactionary, but why? Is it because it is a large fandom and this is just the specific section I find myself in? But HP was pretty large and these sorts of discussions didn't constantly came up. Is it because the subtext brings queer theorists to the yard? Is 'Merlin' just particularly gender/racefaily that it needs to be commented on? I don't think it is the most faily show out there though. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS SHOW AND ITS FANDOM. Admittedly, I've never been immersed in such large fandoms before. Narnia is tiny and all about Susan, and is a total downer canon, and BDS is all about VIOLENCE and, like, didn't have any women in it, so wasn't conducive to these sorts of discussion.
REVOLUTION IS POSSIBLE BUT WILL NEED TO BE REVOLTED AGAINST EVENTUALLY D: