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this is sort of productive kind of
SNOWFLAKES: I can haz! Thank you ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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."
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I'm no Arthurian scholar or medievalist at all, so I'm really not sure. Fanonically there are, which is interesting, and maybe that's where my paper should lie. Like, even when the ficcers are writing about Narnia, the Arthurian tropes are so inescapable that we end up using them to make richer stories. Maybe it's not about how Arthuriana influences Narnia, so much as how it influences Narnia fandom?
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THIS IS JUST GIVING ME CRACK BUNNIES, SGRIO. It is the apocalypse, and Arthur is wandering around dazed around this modern London trying to get a grip on himself so he can save the world, when he bumps into this dude in a white dress. And Jesus is like, who are you? And Arthur says I'm Arthur I'm here to save this land. And of course Jesus is like noooo I'M here to save this land! AND THEN THEY DUKE IT OUT.
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They can meet for tea afterward and compare world-saving methods!
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These stories and folk tales and folk wisdom are totally still with us, so they totally affect us. But how? How does folk tales affect us as opposed to religion?
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And then later subversions in fantasy literature: it's harder to write about women deconstructing gender roles in our shifting modern day, but relatively easier to write about the female knight exploding into a medieval man's world (Alanna, I'm looking at you), especially when the medieval world is also fictional. Haven't there been a bunch of books in the last two decades about the "women behind the throne" in Arthurian and Shakespearian tales?
The last humanities course I took was Sociology 101 freshman year, so take my ramblings with a large a grain of salt as you please.
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Oh yeah, definitely, that was pretty much the whole point of Star Trek. With fantasy/sci-fi, it's easy to construct an entire society devoted to justifying your Morality Anvil. Now that I think about it, C.S. Lewis kind of did the same thing - basically reconstructing BibleLand within a schema of European fairy tales (maybe to make it more accessible to the European Christian child who wouldn't be able to relate as much to the Bible's original Middle Eastern milieu?)
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Gender roles are really hard to deconstruct without accidentally promoting offensive tropes anyway. /whine
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