Accepted author manuscript, 2.55 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Reading real person fiction as digital fiction
T2 - An argument for new perspectives
AU - Fathallah, Judith
PY - 2018/12/31
Y1 - 2018/12/31
N2 - ‘Real person fiction’ (RPF) is a subset of fanfiction that has gone largely unnoticed by academics. A handful of articles have argued for the justification of stories about real (living) people as a legitimate and morally sound art form, but only a very few studies have begun to consider RPF as a genre with its own aesthetics and conventions. This article argues that, to understand fannish RPF, we need to incorporate tools developed by scholars of digital fiction. Almost all fanfic is now produced for and on digital platforms, and moreover, the natural fit between RPF specifically and the study of metalepsis, or self-conscious movement between ‘levels’ of reality and fiction, makes this tool and others imported from the study of digital fiction an illuminating set of lenses through which read it. Along the way, I will incorporate further narrative theory to suggest that we understand appeals to the putative subject of RPF as directed to a ‘fictionalized addressee’, that is, an addressee who is neither purely fictional nor purely nonfictional, but a construct of mediated activity that demonstrates fandom’s participation in the construction of the subcultural celebrity.
AB - ‘Real person fiction’ (RPF) is a subset of fanfiction that has gone largely unnoticed by academics. A handful of articles have argued for the justification of stories about real (living) people as a legitimate and morally sound art form, but only a very few studies have begun to consider RPF as a genre with its own aesthetics and conventions. This article argues that, to understand fannish RPF, we need to incorporate tools developed by scholars of digital fiction. Almost all fanfic is now produced for and on digital platforms, and moreover, the natural fit between RPF specifically and the study of metalepsis, or self-conscious movement between ‘levels’ of reality and fiction, makes this tool and others imported from the study of digital fiction an illuminating set of lenses through which read it. Along the way, I will incorporate further narrative theory to suggest that we understand appeals to the putative subject of RPF as directed to a ‘fictionalized addressee’, that is, an addressee who is neither purely fictional nor purely nonfictional, but a construct of mediated activity that demonstrates fandom’s participation in the construction of the subcultural celebrity.
KW - Convergence
KW - digital cultures
KW - digital fiction
KW - fan cultures
KW - fanfiction
KW - multimodal
KW - narratives
KW - real person fiction
U2 - 10.1177/1354856516688624
DO - 10.1177/1354856516688624
M3 - Journal article
VL - 24
SP - 568
EP - 586
JO - Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
JF - Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
SN - 1354-8565
IS - 6
ER -