Anna Wilson #fundie aeon.co

In his essay ‘Uncritical Reading’ (2004), the Yale English professor Michael Warner writes about the way that universities break students of disreputable reading habits. When students first enter the classroom, he writes:

They identify with characters. They fall in love with authors— they shop around among taste-publics, venturing into social worlds of fanhood and geekdom— Their attention wanders; they skim; they skip around. They mark pages with pink and yellow highlighters. They get caught up in suspense. They laugh; they cry. They get aroused (and stay quiet about it in class). They lose themselves in books, distracting themselves from everything else, especially homework like the reading I assign.

The kind of reading that Warner describes his students bringing in from outside the classroom – excessive, feelings-y, full-body reading – is often associated with reading for pleasure, gobbling up genre fiction such as horror and romance on a lunch break or in the bath; getting the shivers, getting aroused, weeping, the glow from a happy ending. These aren’t pleasures of the classroom. They aren’t for serious literature.

As the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it in her essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (2002), students are taught instead to master what Paul Ricoeur termed ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’. ‘Hermeneutics’ (from the Ancient Greek for ‘translating’) denotes a method or system of interpretation, a way of finding out something. Students are taught to take an objective, almost hostile attitude to a text, to pick it to pieces and investigate it like a crime. They must not love it too much.

The hermeneutics of suspicion is built on centuries of philosophical and pedagogical ideologies that separate body and mind, then rank the mind above the body. As feminist critics have pointed out, these are sexist ideologies, because they associate the mind, in all its rational dimensions, with men, and the body with women, effeminacy and femininity. Indeed, universities were largely closed to women until the 20th century, in part because male academics claimed that women were incapable of distancing their emotions from their thinking. Generations of women had to prove themselves in the academy by being more rational, more clinical, more careful about how they showed emotion to male colleagues; only in the 1970s did feminist critics in Paris such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous – whose work influenced Sedgwick and Warner – begin to question the assumption that bodies and feelings had no place in literary criticism.

Growing up, I loved books. I loved them so much that I went to graduate school to study them, and I didn’t read a novel for five years. One of the terrible secrets about attending graduate school in literature is that it can ruin your ability to read for pleasure; pick up a book, and a nasty voice whispers that you should be reading something serious – or reading something seriously. So in the classroom, I learned to put away my body. Outside of the academy, however, specifically through fanfiction, I was learning to read with it.

I discovered fanfiction in 2001, when I was 16, unhappy at school, and frequently mistaken for a boy in women’s bathrooms. I’d joined a number of web mailing listservs, desperate to make friends, and I remember vividly the first time one of the fanfiction writers I followed posted a story she’d written about a character from The Lord of the Rings. I was staggered. It was like nothing I’d ever read before. Suddenly, I had a word for a genre that I had known intimately for years.

I’d always fantasised about stepping into books and having adventures with my favourite characters. Now I wrote them down and shared them. Strangers left positive comments on each chapter. I discovered that I could write. Later, I learned that there was a name for this kind of story: ‘Mary Sue’. The name comes from the short satire ‘A Trekkie’s Tale’ (1973), written by the mathematician Paula Smith and first published in a Star Trek fanzine to parody the flood of (in her opinion) terrible fanfiction stories in which all-American teenagers with names such as Mary Sue stride into the world of the Starship: Enterprise and win Captain Kirk’s fickle heart. Smith’s parody is embarrassingly similar to my first story, and thousands like it online, written by young women experimenting with fanfiction. But as I read more widely, I discovered a rich vein of sophisticated and brilliantly written fanfiction, offering insights into characters I knew and loved.

While bingeing on Harry Potter fanfiction, I was taking courses at high school, then university, in classical and medieval literature. I learned Latin, and read Virgil, Cicero and St Augustine in the original language. I wrote cold, sober, critical essays, but stayed up late into the night with fanfiction, my guilty pleasure, seemingly as far removed from the study of literature as it was possible to be. I moved to Canada to go to graduate school. By then I knew that fantasising about meeting Geoffrey Chaucer, or imagining what Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine might do if she met Sir Lancelot, was not the way serious readers did it. But I struggled with cognitive dissonance, since it was obvious to me that fanfiction had made me good at reading.

6 comments

Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register. Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.