Henry Jenkins on Not Belonging

[ellenkushner]

Our pal, new media guru & fabulous guy Henry Jenkins, was kind enough to write an introduction, On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, to Interfictions 2 - and to allow us to post the entire intro on the IAF website. I thought I'd clip & post a brief selection to entice you to read the whole thing:

Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers . . . . And where the market doesn't impose such specifications, we add them ourselves. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that the best fan fiction is "unpublishable" in the sense that it operates across the genre categories, aesthetic norms, and ideological constraints that shape commercial publishing. Fans self-publish in order to step outside those filters. Yet, the fan community also imposes its own categories, which help readers find the "right story" through author's notes that tell us, for example, which "ships" (relationships between specified pairs of characters) are being explored, offer a rough sense of their sexual explicitness or emotional tone, warn us about vexing themes, and so forth. . . . All of this focus on using genres to classify and shelve works assumes that we know where one genre ends and another begins and that genre works stay where we put them. Genres may be optical illusions, which come and go like mirages, depending on the ways we look at the texts in question.

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You can read Jenkins' entire essay, and comment here.

And once you've done that, I hope you'll want to read Interfictions 2 in print or as an ebook. And don't forget the Auction!

Comments

[ken-schneyer.livejournal.com]

That essay is pure Henry.

Know where I first met him? A Harry Potter con.