Essay of the Damned, Part II

Gerald once said something about entering the "writing space" and being unable to leave, giving that as his excuse for keeping me and Andrea long after the Wit meetings were over, feeding us theory like candy, which was good, since we hadn't eaten.

I was talking with Emma tonight about this essay, and realized just how big the topic is. And suddenly, in a spontaneous overflow of dry academia, I saw my dissertation. The chapters aligned themselves, the bibliography became manifest. And I immediately became frightened.

On with the show.
      MediaMiner.org, on the other hand, is devoted almost entirely to anime fandom, although Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings also appear on the series list. In addition to hosting fanfics, Mediminer allows users to upload fan rendered drawings based on anime/manga ("fanart"), to review and rate a series, and to participate in Role Playing Games (PRGs), in which participants of the game take turns writing paragraphs or scenes from "their" character's point of view. The RPG section has grown recently, due to new restrictions placed on the genres and types of fanfics allowed in the searchable database. Second person stories and "Create your own Adventure" (CYOA) stories were moved to the RPG section in the Fall of 2004. Notices on the home page in red alert users to this new restriction, and points them to the RPG forums for further information.
The rhetorical situation: Audience, Restrictions, Exigency
      In noting the volume of texts being produced from the originary text, and the available means of publication, I am already beginning to frame the rhetorical situation of fanfics. Bitzer used the term "rhetorical situation" to identify the elements that shape a piece of rhetoric. While he was thinking primarily of the texts studied by speech communication departments, his framework is also helpful here. If we take seriously the injunction of Kenneth Burke and Jacques Derrida (Eek! I couldn't avoid mentioning him!) that spoken and written texts differ little and should not be placed in heirarchies of "rhetoric" and "literature" or "speech" and "writing," Bitzer's three areas composing the "rhetorical situation" becomes applicable.
      Bitzer identifies what he calls "Exigency," "Audience," and "Constraints or Restrictions" to compose his understanding of Aristotle's "kairos," which Bitzer translates as "situation." To understand how fanfics are composed--and thus to understand their arguments and overall purpose--I will attempt to describe the rhetorical situation of the genre. I have already begun this task in my framing of the object of study for this essay: in defining "fanfic" I necessarily had to limit my scope to those pertaining to anime, and to those that are available to read via a searchable database. In order to narrow even further, I have already mentioned which types of fanfic I am concerned with: those legitimated by fanfiction.net and Mediaminer.org. This framing is fairly arbitrary, except to say that these are the texts that I am most familiar with, and are the most easily accessible.
      In invoking Bitzer's framework, I will also begin to touch on the second part of my essay, an analysis of the rhetorical moves of three specific fanfics. This is probably avoidable, but because the domain of fanfics is itself transitory and contingent on multiple overlapping factors, it is difficult to isolate what is "Rhetorical move" from what is "constrained by situation." Because some of the boundaries can only be unblurred by taking into account authorial intention, I will avoid making distinctions between my modes of analysis in those areas where proof of intent would be needed to clarify the motive behind the resulting text.
Exigence
      Perhaps one of Bitzer's most difficult categories to extrapolate into the literary arena is Exigence. While the exigence of a Presidential Inaugural Speech or newspaper article is fairly obvious, the need-fulfilling purpose of not just fanfics but of poems, short stories and novels, is not quite as clear. In the materially published literary arena, one could cite "financial gain" as exigence, or "fame" or "need to inform audience of their own world," the first of these being perhaps the easiest to understand in Bitzer's terms. Burke uses the term "attitude" to describe the purpose of literature--that is, to move the audience toward a certain attitude. "The Waste Land," then, would have the exigency of showing readers that their time is a time like no other, that the world is in trouble. It is difficult to talk about exigency, however, when literature, in general, is produced and written over longer periods of time than speeches and news copy.
      What need does fanfiction fill? What recurring social situation (to use the language of modern genre theorists) does it respond to? It would be easier to study the exigency of the production of specific texts who have specific authors than to make a statement about the exigency of the genre as a whole. What immediately comes to mind are recent studies on "fandom" and the psychology of those who participate in fan-related activities. Instead of giving an overview of those theories here, I believe the important aspects can be summed up using Barry Brummett's understanding of Burke's "representative anecdote," that some texts are written as ways of mediating social tensions. That entire genres exist to both alleviate some of the tension from the author's life--that is, to play out the situation and imagine solutions--and to give readers a road map to follow in their own lives. Fanfics remove the responsibility of creating an entire world-the originary text has already established parameters--and instead allow the writer and reader to project onto pre-set characters problems which then play themselves out in the resulting story. Because the originary text is one the fan is highly familiar with, and, being "fiction" is always/already more stabilized and predictable than the real world, fanfics provide a sense of comfort as well as creation: While there are already some constraints on the author before she even begins to write, the author can (and often does) create a fairly complex story line, introducing new characters (often based on friends or family of the author) and new relationships between them. The resulting texts are heavily descriptive and highly imaginative, since the author often must invent a way to let him or herself into the text without ignoring or revising the original.
      This is just one instance of exigency in fanfics. The exigencies of fandom itself are far too complex for this essay. I would suggest (without any other proof than my own experience) that there is, at this point in American culture, a desire to be in more contact with the originary text, to enter more fully into the discourse so as to completely be in communication (see Plato's "Phaedrus"). I will, however, leave that observation for others to study.
Audience
      My opening anecdote about my own experience becoming an audience member provides some basis for analyzing the audience members.


And...I can't do any more. I need sleep! Now that I've set up the structure, this should be fun!