The Rhetoric of Fan Studies: PCA/ACA 2009, Draft 1

The Popular and the Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan studies (v2.2) Comments welcome!

Popular and Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan Studies
Presented at PCA/ACA National Conference 2009
April 9, 2009
New Orleans, LA

I hid in the closet of fandom for years. My Master's degree was survived mainly by secretive late night forays into fic and vid and art and dubs--consuming fanworks to relax after Derrida. But why did I have to be so secretive? Fandom has always had some social stigma, perhaps best exemplified by the Simpson's character Comic Book Guy: a fat slob living at home, sad and lonely, too immersed in his fantasy worlds to attempt the performance of Normal that the rest of us partake in. Today I want to talk about that stigma, how it appears in academic conversations, and ways that we might legitimate the study of fandom(s) without resorting to "the popular" as our justification. Specifically, I want to suggest there are significant tensions in the language of fan studies: First, there is an unacknowledged dissonance in our language about fandom that stems from the difference between popularity and fanaticism. Second, there is a tension created by the language of popularity that categorizes fandom as somehow both “mass” and “unique,” both mainstream and eccentric. What results from these tensions is first a sense that a fandom is a legitimate object of study only for what it can show us about mass media, consumption, identity formation and the like. But in this assumption, the fans themselves and the products of fandom are still somewhat trivial (if not downright silly) and will disappear once the object of that fanaticism is no longer in the public eye.

Fandom is nothing new--and I'm even talking pre-Trek here, long before a person like Comic Book Guy could even exist and subsist within a society. Fiction in confluence with a middle class and industrial-print culture seems to create fandom as it grows, with the Pamela fandom of the 1740s as our earliest archived example. I’ll talk about the importance of archiving as legitimation later, but for now let us just say that fan studies might be said to be as old as the first critics of The Novel in general, those who spoke of silly little girls too busy reading to do their proper (house)work. In her book Consuming Pleasures Jennifer Pool Hayward examines fandom through the lens of serial production--and we might say that fandom is necessarily drawn to serial texts, if we were to make such broad generalizations. In tracing Dickens fandom, Hayward examines the pleasures of consuming a serial text, giving value to such a study by invoking a Marxist critique: Fandom in the past is important because it can show us cultural modes of production, movements of ideologies, and creation and maintenance of hegemony, particularly of the gendered sort.

My concern today is not with the studies of fans in the past, for many of these give value to the fandom by pointing to, not surprisingly, the permanence, artistry, and worthiness of the original text. Popularity and “mass“ audiences often characterize these fan works, which are not noted for their own intrinsic value as fan texts, but for what they can show us about the spirit of the age in which they were created. Aside, perhaps, from Joseph Andrews and his parody Shamela, no one I've met or read in "early" fan studies refers to a fan-writer by name or an exemplary fan-work by its title. By merging “popular” with “fanaticism,” we can study fandom as an interesting, but temporary phenomenon that emerges from the texts they reference. I wish to suggest that, at least in the digital era, fandom is not as dependent on the text it adores, but has created itself to be a nearly independent system of knowledge creating and knowledge sharing that can sustain itself across multiple, transient media events.

I am limiting my discussion to the fandom of the late 1990s through today because, true to our assumptions about the fickle nature of popularity, earlier fan works have been lost to us. The transience of fan works and fandom in general is part of what makes it a difficult object to study. The lack of an archive or a canon that can serve as what Latour and Woolgar call “immutable mobiles,“ those documents that serve as a foundation of knowledge for a community and serve as constitutional documents that create the community from nothingness gives us no common base from which to speak, doubtlessly causes some of the disjuncture we feel in fan studies. Further, when popular culture became an object of study, it became so within a Marxist-Foucauldian framework of ideological control. In this case, what is popular is what is hegemonic, and what is hegemonic tends to be without value in academia, unless it is to analyze the ways in which a text is hegemonic (and therefore uncritical, manipulative, and bad). Horkheimer and Adorno (as well as countless pop psychologists and after school specials) tell us that popular media are dumbing us down, working to institutionalize us by entertainment, and, in general, is for uneducated fools whose attention flits to whatever shiny object the producers flash at us. While we here at the PCA attempt to argue against that, some of that language and its values tend to seep into our language anyway, and we begin to assume that fandom is synonymous with consumption and all that is new.

This language appears, however rationalized, in many fandom studies. Cornel Sandvoss provides the most complete critique of such language in his introduction to Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: “The Balance between structure and agency is…crucial to the academic analysis of fandom….In [many] approaches fandom is interpreted as a consequence of mass culture needing to compensate for a lack of intimacy, community and identity” (2). Further, Sandvoss questions the definition of fandom as identity formation, and instead provides his own, which I borrow, for the most part, here: “I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (8). As his examples, Sandvoss points to Joli Jenson for her examination of the language used in common parlance and in some academic writings. In “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” Jenson reminds us of the psychological and medical explanations of fan-ish behavior--a pathology, an unfulfilled relationship, a Freudian error in the fan‘s upbringing (9). The scholarly accounts, however were few and far between when Jenson wrote in 1992, and the criticisms tend not to be from media scholars. Still, the language of pathology or deviance that Jenson cleverly pulls from multiple sources has remained in our language, even as fans came to describe themselves in the summer of 2007 as pirates (see post 4/15/08: The Symbolic and the Virtual Event, to be presented at NCA 2009).

Of course, Henry Jenkins remains our key scholar in fandom. In Textual Poachers and later in Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasizes the unique aspect of certain fandoms, what Sandvoss calls an “assumed uniqueness” that characterizes most fan studies. Jenkins might be the first to treat online fan works as legitimate objects of study; he cites the URLs of specific works and larger communities with the same academic rigor that the rest of us give to Dickens and Shakespeare. Like many fan scholars, Jenkins emphasizes the subversivness of fandom without acknowledging the tension between fanaticism and subversion, between “mass” media and counter-culture.
Several volumes of fan studies have emerged in recent years, and like Jenkins, they remain enthusiastic about the potential scholarly work available to fandom scholars, but continue to use language that celebrates the ex-centricity of fandom, emphasizes the subversiveness of fan works, and mark fandom as Other. The introduction to Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own notes the connection of fandom to oral culture and domestic storytelling that skews fandom demographics toward the female gender. The book surveys and analyzes certain communities that the author notes are dominated by women and tries to explain the need for and the pleasure in such activities. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, the editors (including Sandvoss), dedicate the introductory chapter to “Why Study Fans?“ The editors try to summarize “three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades” to come up with their answers, which include the subversive nature of fandom, the economic power of fandom that has television producers salivating for our attention, fandom as a mirror for what Bourdieu calls “habitus,“ and, more currently, fandom as “a cultural practice tied to specific forms of social and economic organization” (8-9). Neither Bury nor the authors of Fandom are too concerned with the connection of fandom to “popularity;” instead, these studies mark fans as an object (and as such, necessarily Others the fans) to be studied for what we can learn about larger cultural movements or human nature in general.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Othering fans this way; fans themselves embrace this designation in their t-shirts, in their icons, in their posts that include some kind of self-disclosure. Whether we Other fans as subversive agents against mass culture or dismiss them as blind, adoring audiences, fans and fandom will and have survived in one form or another. In fact, “survival” of fandom may be one way we can begin to think of fan works as more than temporary manifestations of a fad. The connection of fandom to “popular” culture hinders us here--how can something be both popular and permanent?

The unstated criticism is that fan works, as non-legitimated narratives, exist only within a localized community and then only briefly. In the days of zines and snail mail fic and vid exchanges, few copies were made, and even fewer were available to outside readers. Without the backing of a publisher or producer, fan works tend to first shine brightly then fade from our consciousness. Without an (published) anthology to catalogue them, fanworks do not have a canon for academic study. Imagine trying to teach a class on fandom that focuses on the fan-produced texts themselves--what to include? The "textbook" as Bernadette Longo reminds us in Spurious Coin, is a legitimating tool in academia--a guide for what to teach, why to teach it, and what is teachable. Likewise, anthologies symbolically inscribe a field and guide scholars towards what is acceptable, even good, text. Despite the growing number of fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and scholars of fandom, we have no central, legitimated field. So where might we look, if we were to teach such a class or (God forbid?) create such a field?

First, we would probably find key authors in fandom--most likely those that write across many fandoms or those who are the most read. Perhaps the most celebrated fic (and some would argue, fic writer) in slash fandom comes from Speranza. “Written by the Victors” is, as one fan put it “what fanfic should be.” The 330K file is a long fic, coming in at several thousand words. More importantly, Speranza gives us a new genre that represents the core desires of fandom: to make the fandom world more present, more real, more encompassing, and to change that world as we see fit. “Victors” or the “VictorsVerse” tells a fairly standard Stargate: Atlantis story, an imagined universe where the crew on Atlantis officially split from Earth and form their own culture--a culture that allows for explorations into otherwise improbable romantic plots that facilitate slash relationships. In Victors, however, Speranza does not provide the standard narrative, but tells the story through quotes from books on the history of the Atlantis expedition. Of course, these books are not any more real than Atlantis itself, but Speranza’s authoritative academic voice makes these excerpts believable. An incident that would have perhaps been a chapter of a long fanfic is thus described through a quote from “Tina Eber,” author of the book The Atlantis Chronicles, Volume 2, page 37:

While we will never know for sure what happened on the evening of 17 January 5 A.T, we can make several educated guesses. It is probable, despite William Summerville's analysis in "The SGC's Real Target?" (Journal Of Political Diplomacy, OUP: 2010), that John Sheppard was the object of the attack. It is likely that Armitage planned to ambush or otherwise surprise Sheppard; Armitage's military record, as well as her preference for knives, shows a distinct predilection for stealth. It is also likely that McKay stumbled upon or otherwise interrupted her approach; it is unlikely that he would have sustained the degree of injury Royce witnessed if Sheppard had been in the fight. Royce's description accords with McKay having made a brave, if clumsy, grab for the knife while Sheppard's back was literally or metaphorically turned; it is not unreasonable to speculate that his injuries were sustained almost immediately as Armitage tried to ward him off. (“Victors” Book 3).

“Victors” has spawned a “VictorsVerse” that features both standard fan works and styles similar to what Speranza has done. What is important about this particular fic is the response it has elicited from the community: it has been bookmarked on Delicious by a thousand people, recommended in multiple fandoms, and, in general, recognized as one of the best scifi fics ever.
The fact that so many fans recognize Speranza (by her several online nicknames) as a key writer for the community is another way, I think, fandom can be seen as more permanent than other aspects of popular culture. Victors has captured the attention of the fan community as a whole--not just SGA fans. And any fan entering the SGA fandom will be recommended (recc’d) this story. "Victors," and other similar iconic fics, show the start of a canon for Stargate fandom and fandom as a whole.

Of course, the problem with fandom, even one as wide as the Stargate fandoms, is that it is tied to an original text, and once that original text disappears from the public eye, we would expect--assuming a close tie between the popular and the fanatic--the fandom to die as well. And in some ways this is true; enthusiasm for a given text dials down as new texts enter the media stream and our consumer consciousnesses.

Sandvoss’s definition of “sustained interaction” with a text only applies while the fandom is in vogue. In his definition both in the introduction and later in his book, fandom is still highly transient; it is the fan that remains the same. When interest dies, the fandom dies. But in many cases, most notably, the Buffyverse, Due South, and Star Trek, the original text is several years (if not decades) dead, while the fandom surges on. The ease of file bootlegging and DVD boxed sets allows for new fans to join, and many fans follow each other from one fandom to the next, creating relationships that extend beyond a single fandom. And jumping into an older fandom is easy, as I found out last summer when I consumed the whole of Due South in about a week. For example, using recommendation lists, newcomers can easily locate the most proliferous members and the most celebrated fan texts of that fandom. Major authors begin to emerge after a few minutes of research: Cassandra Clare, SuEric, Speranza, and Aristide, top may lists if quality writers

And most of their works in fact can be found with relative ease, thanks to an almost fevered effort to catalogue, categorize, and archive the fics of a fandom. Websites like the LiveJournal-hosted “dsficfinders” allows users to request help finding such works--all an inquiring fan has to do is describe what they remember about a favorite fic, and the community responds with suggestions within 24 hours--usually within an hour or two. Fans can even describe elements they want to read in a story, and the community will recommend the best version they know.

In Harry Potter fandom, Fictionalley features an overwhelming archive of fan works. Larger, multiple fandom sites such as fan fiction.net and mediaminer.org host thousands upon thousands of fic and art and poetry and snippets of conversation that would have, in the days of mimeographs and mailing lists, long been rotting in a landfill.

When LiveJournal purged several dozen communities in the summer of 2007, fans were outraged for the loss of years of conversations, “inscribed” proof of their lives and communities. The fics could be replaced (and they were, since many fans stored their favorites on separate thumb drives or email accounts), but the textual evidence, the immutable mobiles that made the fandom more than just a momentary enthusiasm, was gone. Using archives (and now, carefully backed-up archives) allows a fandom to subsist long after the object of its attention has faded from the public eye.

The inscription of fandom into texts and archives suggests that associating fan studies with popular culture may be, for now, a mistake. As “pop culture studies” grows, it will, probably, throw off some of the assumptions of transience and frivolity, and maybe even “mass.” Fandom is not, and cannot be both a part of mass media--that is, a part of the “mainstream” and part of the ex-centric, and it is time we stop looking at fandom as such. I’ve only begun to list here some of the processes that are now helping fandom become more permanent, more legitimate, and hopefully others can add those I am not aware of. Comments, like in fandom, are always welcome.

____________________________

Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
“Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Joli, Jensen. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice. Eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 19-68. Reprinted at www.bruno-latour.fr. 9 April 2009. 4 April 2009.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Speranza. “Written By The Victors.” 2007. Accessed 9 April 2009. See also “VictorsVerse Art and Artifacts.” Accessed 9 April 2009.

Annotated Bib: Battlestar Galactica

A temporary posting of my BSG annotated bibliography:

“33.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005.

The first episode of the series, “33” explores the first few days after the initial Cylon attack. The episode is notable for its attention to time; “33” refers to how long the crew has between each new Cylon attack.


Battlestar Galactica Podcasts. http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/. 14 July 2006.

In an attempt to give viewers even more of their favorite shows, the SciFi channel and other cable networks have begun producing Podcasts, which can be downloaded and played with the show simultaneously. Podcasts speak to the desire of viewers to extend the discourse of the plot by allowing the authors to name their intents and give background information about the construction of each episode—including providing oft-quoted spoilers and character analyses. The Podcast for the final episode attempts to explain the director and writer’s choice in narrative trajectory, citing a need for a refreshing storyline.

Booker, M. Keith. Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2006.

Booker’s latest explication of science fiction history and evolution explores the intersection of SF and American ideology, particularly post-modern ideologies. First, he posits “America as Utopia—Or Not,” naming our current period as “post-utopian” (4) because “The particular nature of American historical experience complicates the American utopian imagination” (11). Seeing SF film and literature as a cultural critique of Cold War and post-Cold War ideologies, Booker traces the “weak” utopianism in major works of the latter 20th century (25). Anti-utopianism, he argues, results in the fragmented narrative style and uncertain arguments usually associated with postmodernism, and the two are inherently related. As a post-apocalyptic dystopia, Battlestar Galactica: 2003 demonstrates both the hesitancy to establish social and moral norms and the non-linear narrative style that Booker attributes to the intersection of postmodernism and utopianism. Booker’s argument that narrative style is a symptom of social conditions, of audience needs, assumptions, and desires, is helpful in that he is able to link such disparate texts as Psycho and Cinderella by pointing to the overall ideologies created by the construction of each text. Battlestar Galactica: 2003 draws from several Hitchcockian techniques to create a dissonance in the subjective point of view, and Booker’s relation of Hitchcock’s techniques to anti-utopianism should prove useful.

---. Science Fiction Television. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.

Booker gives a history of the evolution of science fiction in television, beginning with the classic Twilight Zone and ending with a brief note about the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. Booker outlines the premises of the major and minor programs and describes the stylistics of each series. What is important about this text is its attention to intertextuality among series, particularly in relation to the earliest SF television. While the book as a whole lacks a central thesis, it does provide insight into the emergence of more “intelligent” SF, such as the X-Files and Babylon 5 as contextually contingent.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.

As a book “about plot and plotting,” Reading for the Plot (xi) attempts to “talk of the dynamics of temporality and reading, of the motor forces that drive the text forward, of the desires that connect narrative ends and beginnings” (xii-xiv). Brooks, taking a Freudian model informed by plot and narratology, highlights the structures of plot in relation to the distinction between story and discourse (or fabula and sjužet) (24-25). Brooks’s claims of the inherent human need for narrative and the structures which facilitate playing out those desires (such as the detective story) provide a way to understand Battlestar Galactica’s narrative techniques and the final episode’s sudden shift of time. Because readers/viewers constantly desire a recital of the events around a trauma (here, the destruction of the human race), Battlestar Galactica (successfully) tells and retells the events around the apocalypse, discursively moving slowly through diegetical time in order to satisfy readers’ desire for disclosure.

Gordon, Ian. “Superman on the Set: The Market, Nostalgia and Television Audience.” Quality Popular Television. Eds Mark Jancovich and James Lyons. London: British Film Institute, 2003.148-162.

Gordon argues that the must-see Lois and Clark of the 1990s was the result of nostalgia for earlier television sweeping the US, that it “allowed its audience, or a segment of its diverse audience, to long for something lost and address that longing in a critical manner” (156). Other television programs engaged in nostalgia, including That 70’s Show, target audience desires for the past by revisiting it with a critical eye, but Lois and Clark maintained a timeless look. Battlestar Galactica, whose mini-series production was most certainly initiated by nostalgia for the 1970s version, makes a similar move to Lois and Clark in that the timeline of the series in relation to our own time is uncertain, and its relation to the original series is also questionable. Is this the same Galactica retold, or is the war Adama claims to have fought in his youth the one we were shown in the 1970s? What makes these shows successful, Gordon argues, is their appeal to our memories of not the shows themselves, but the context in which they were broadcast originally. What makes them count as “quality” is the subtle shift in storyline from action/adventure to drama, from a focus on saving the world to a focus on character development.


Hoppenstand, Gary. “Series(ous) SF Concerns.” Journal of Popular Culture. 38:4 (2005): 603-604.

Hoppenstand’s short editorial eloquently raises familiar concerns about the future embodiments of the SF genre, that it has become too formulaic and commercialized. He argues that “these three giants of science fiction [Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars] and fantasy are the primary cause of the apparent stagnation of speculative fiction” (604). His fears that “science fiction and fantasy, having successfully escaped their disreputable origins, have now apparently returned to the disreputable” (604) may be well founded, but Hoppenstand also ignores some of the more recent “risks” taken by such SF TV as Battlestar Galactica.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.

Jameson’s newest collection of essays takes on the subject of Utopia—both as a political ideal and as a literary genre. “Part I: The Desire Called Utopia” explores utopian thought as a whole, stemming from human desires and socio-economic conditions, while “Part II: As Far as Thought Can Reach” examines several SF texts in which utopian impulses are central. For my purposes, “The Barriers of Time” and “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future” are the most significant essays, as they take into account what is narratable and how that narration formally emerges due to constraints in time and space in the world of text. In “Progress,” Jameson argues that what SF shows us is not the limitless nature of human imagination, but the limit of what is sayable—all SF is about the present. Battlestar Galactica has taken on issues such as stem-cell research, A.I., terrorism, and martial law—all of which point to a concern for the present. Additionally, the filming techniques BSG utilizes implies a documentary or journalistic feel, not a cinematic one, again drawing connections between the viewer’s universe and that of Galactica. The real-time feel of the series also shows us our struggles with forecasting the future, with giving dystopic warnings to ourselves retroactively; if BSG is a history of a civilization, it is one meant to warn us of our own pending apocalypse—but it can only show us what we already know and imagine.

Jones, Sara Gwenllian. “Web Wars: Resistance, Online Fandom and Studio Censorship.” Quality Popular Television. Eds Mark Jancovich and James Lyons. London: British Film Institute, 2003. 163-176.

Jones discusses the evolution of “fandom” from the “harmless bunch of obsessives” in Star Trek garb to a condition cultivated by networks in order to produce revenue from merchandizing (165). Part of what is notable about Battlestar Galactica is its popularity and large fan base, despite its heavy involvement in issues such as the meaning of humanity, sexuality, and technology. Jones’s history of fandom and its relationship to network decisions about content provides a frame for understanding the reemergence of BSG in the first place, and its continued popularity in the second. BSG relies on many of the same mechanisms of fan creation that Jones attributes to The X-Files, and her comments on the creation of subtext as a tool of fandom formation can probably be applied to BSG, despite the vast difference between the series stylistically.

“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 10 Mar 2005.

The last episode of the second season, “Lay Down Your Burdens” ran for 90 minutes, playing over five minutes into the next programming slot. The last five minutes represent a startling shift in narrative style and content, and the events caused outrage among the fans for its divergence from the BSG style.

Moore, Ron. “Blog.” http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/

Ron Moore, head writer for Battlestar Galactica, in addition to giving commentary in Podcasts, updates fans on the show’s progress throughout the writing process. The most recent entry is from April, responding to questions viewers had about the season finale. What is important about this blog is not so much the ability to reveal authorial “intent” but its ability to reflect viewer concerns, audience-author interaction, and at least one explication of a given episode. The blog also reflects the authors’ struggle with the text—to turn a traditional SF program into good TV.

Suvin, Darko. “Narrative Logic, Ideology, and the Range of SF.” Science Fiction Studies. 26:9 (March 1982): 1-25.

As the title suggests, Suvin’s essay explores, in a set of three hypotheses and tests, the limit of SF imagination and representation. Specifically, Suvin is concerned with extension and intension in the text, the central characteristics of SF narration, and the reasons for the “dominant emasculation” of SF texts which undermine their own premises (by mere silliness, or by ending with “it was all a dream”). More interesting for my project is Suvin’s explanation and adoption of HG Wells’ hierarchy of SF—broken down into the emasculated “pessimum” SF, the middle-ground SF (“most”), “good” SF and Suvin’s own addition of an “Optimum SF.” Using early British SF novel-length texts, Suvin “tests” his hypotheses about why there is such a large range between “good” SF and the pulp SF many of us think of as the norm. This article provides one way to evaluate SF based on a set of criteria from literary criticism and narratology. The original two manifestations of Battlestar Galactica seem to fit into the “pessimum” range while the third one has the characteristics Suvin identifies for “optimum” SF—effective, engaging SF. While his model is not perfect, his explanations for what makes an SF text “good” are a helpful heuristic for determining the difference between Galactica’s forms.

Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero.” The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 1-19.

Wolfe examines the narrative structure of post-apocalyptic fiction, arguing that those texts which begin at the end (of the world) offer readers a chance to imagine the possibility of “remaking zero” or starting civilization afresh (5-6). Wolfe’s model of the structure of post-apocalyptic fiction has five parts: The discovery of the event, the “journey through the wasteland”, creation of a new community, the “re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist,” and a final battle between the survivors to decide the structure of the new world (8). While Wolfe’s structure cannot be directly applied to Battlestar Galactica, (the “wilderness” is space itself), his sketch does provide an outline for a more traditional structure than what BSG offers, and can be used for contrasting the two versions of narrating the end of everything.

Revising my work: Evelina essay

This essay I am particularly proud of. Written for Emily Allen's course on the British Novel. Some typos, and more close reading needed. Might need to insert some Blair.


A Good Woman Learning to Speak Well: Speech and Argumentation in Evelina

Not long after her first excursions into London social circles, the title character of Evelina writes to her guardian Mr. Villars: “But, really, I think there ought to be a book, of the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people, upon their first introduction into pubic company” (Burney 83). As arguments, novels represent female characters with given traits in a positive or negative light, thus promoting or discouraging certain behaviors in readers—Evelina’s book exists, and she is one of many who are presenting to young readers the customs of polite society. In contextualizing the novels’ rise as both a cause and effect of the rise of a middle class, critics such as Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, and J. Paul Hunter argue that novels act as what Kenneth Burke calls "strategic answers, stylized answers" (The Philosophy of Literary Form 1). Novels offer both reader and writer a symbolic means to react in an uncertain situation. The female heroine of Evelina and other eighteenth-century novels negotiate for the reader this uncertain environment and eventually arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
If we take these as our premises, then we must next ask what behavior is being promoted through the female heroines. McKeon, Hunter, and Armstrong have argued that the target behavior is either an appropriate sexuality or domestication by pointing to the characterization and plot development in these novels. The domesticated or tamed female has been described as modest or decorous in her actions, but apart from elocution, little has been written about women’s speech, particularly argumentative speech.
Patricia Howell Michaelson’s Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen takes up the issue of women’s speech as represented in Austen’s novels, and the resulting social action that representation incurred. Michaelson is concerned with sociolinguists’ interpretation of “gendered language” as a question of “bad,” submissive silence as opposed to a strategic ethos of silence (4-6). Silence, for Michaelson, is not necessarily a sign of submission—it may be a rhetorical choice. If rhetoric has been, since Quintilian, defined partly as “a good man speaking well,” how are we to understand the utterances, or lack thereof of good women? While Michaelson studies the dialogue and conversational aspects of Austen’s novels, however, I am interested in the ways the novels describe and thus prescribe (or argue for) an appropriate female rhetor through these conversations..
Written by Frances Burney in 1778, Evelina seems to be particularly concerned with speech, more so than earlier novels. Evelina, with its central female narrator learning how to navigate various discourse conventions, prescribes for its female audience a way of arguing that embodies politeness, wit, and, above all, ethos over pathos. The history of rhetoric has been a history of conflict over the relative importance of these elements. In the eighteenth century, Wilbur Howell argues, the influence of Ramus placed concerns of ethos and elocution over logic, which was completely removed from rhetoric. When Mrs. Selwyn says “But for this observation […] I protest I should have supposed that a peer of the realm and an able logician were synonymous terms” (361) she is referring not to a connection to philosophical logics, but to Aristotelian “logic,” which we now call rhetoric. Those who spoke of “rhetoric” were most often working with Cicero’s reading of the Greek rhetoricians (Howell 75). While “rhetoric” as we now use it would not have been involved with epistemological questions or dialectical constructions, Howell claims that these ideas were debated in the 18th century, just as a separate category. Cicero’s popularity might have saved rhetoric from descending completely into elocution; the 18th Ciceronians, according to Howell, interpreted Cicero’s rhetoric as
the chief art of discourse, [which] consisted of all the principles and precepts which regulated all speaking and all writing addressed to popular audiences on occasions when some doctrine had to be taught, some thesis proved, some great achievement or great man celebrated for public enlightenment, or some course of action proposed as the best response to the facts of the case and to the human interests and feelings concerned. (77)
This last concern of eighteenth century rhetoric is what we find to be the preoccupation of Evelina: How, the novel asks, should women respond to “the facts” of a case of conflicts of interest? To revise Quintillian, how do we know when a good woman is speaking well?
Evelina provides possible strategic and stylized answers to this question in two ways. First, there is the epistolary nature of the novel; Evelina is writing to her father, being careful to omit some details, and to “delicately” phrase others. In first asking Mr. Villars for permission to go to London, Evelina hedges her arguments with deferrals to Mr. Villars’s authority: “They are to make a very short stay in town. The captain will meet them in a day or two. Mrs. Mirvan and her sweet daughter both go;--what a happy party! Yet I am not very eager to accompany them: at least, I shall be very well contented to remain where I am, if you desire I should” (25). In her appeal, Evelina first convinces Mr. Villars of her safety (the captain will appear shortly, and the Mirvan women go often anyway) before submitting, however grudgingly.
Evelina censors for her father several scenes, first by not quoting herself directly, and secondly by simply omitting events. Upon discovering the stranger in their coach is none other than Madame Duval, her grandmother, Evelina writes “But I will not shock you with the manner of her acknowledging me, or the bitterness, the grossness—I cannot otherwise express myself—with which she spoke of those unhappy past transactions you have so pathetically related to me” (54). Evelina’s reluctance to repeat Madame Duval’s “gross” speech shows that she has already a strong education in what is appropriate speech for women.
Michaelson categorizes this type of polite, censorious speech as one of three techniques Austen teaches us: “[Pride and Prejudice] begins […] with an example of what not to do in conversation, with Mr. Bennet’s refusal to participate in the turn-taking cooperatives we expect” (203). Madame Duval may take part in the turn-taking, but other discourse conventions of late eighteenth century England elude her, and Evelina is careful to show Mr. Villars that she knows that her grandmother’s speech is not acceptable. Michaelson sees similar comments in Pride and Prejudice on what not to say: “Earlier, formal modes of conversation are ridiculed in the obsequious flattery of Mr. Collins, who not only constantly spouts fawning phrases, but actually plans them out ahead of time” (204). In Austen, the “polite converser actively smoothes interactions and feelings”—and does not speak with “impertinence” (204-205); her novels prescribe this action. Evelina’s letters, in their censoring, show readers what not to say.
Evelina’s original insistence on omitting or glossing over for Mr. Villars the inappropriate speeches does not mean that Evelina is necessarily arguing for complete silence on the part of a female rhetor; instead, we must see Evelina’s letters in terms of the structure of the novel itself. Each of the three volumes provides Evelina opportunities to practice and perfect her writing and speech, and each repetition of events shows her improving her responses. This type of structure is itself an argument; Burke calls it a “repetitive form”: “Repetitive form is the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises. It is restatement of the same thing in different ways” (125). Evelina restates common social interactions—dances, theater, walking in gardens, courtship—in each of its three volumes, with slight shifts in characters and context.
While Evelina’s rhetorical moves in her letters show us an increasing sophistication of discourse analysis and response, the speech she represents in those letters is perhaps more important in that this representation is more obvious in its prescription. The three-volume structure of Evelina provides, as stated above, a qualitative progression for readers to measure and analyze Evelina’s education (and thus her speech). Readers know that the early arguments Evelina makes are less appropriate or mature than those appearing later. The “young” Evelina is not to be emulated, but is to be used as a starting point for further development.
In the novel, “argument” is difficult to separate from daily speech; we could argue that all speech is an argument of sorts, even if it is just an argument for the character of the speaker. In Evelina, much of the speech represented directly is connected to conflict, as these comprise the interesting parts of Evelina’s life. “Arguments” are all around Evelina, whether in the form of serious conflict, or mere negotiation of opinions of where to spend the evening. The early arguments Evelina finds herself in are largely out of her control; she does not yet have the skills to navigate the discourse community of “the world” outside Mr. Villars’ home. For most of her arguments, then, Evelina is silenced; at her first dance, she finds herself unable to even speak to Lord Orville: “He begged to know if I was not well? You may easily imagine how much I was confused. I made no answer, but hung my head, like a fool, and looked on my fan” (32). Later, she is embarrassed by her silence: “It now struck me, that he was resolved to try whether or not I was capable of speaking on any subject. This put so great a constraint upon my thoughts, that I was unable to go further than a monosyllable, and no even so far, when I could possibly avoid it” (34). Her lack of knowledge about “the world” prevents her from making an appropriate response.
Current-traditional rhetoric and most sociolinguistic theories find silence to be the most submissive position to be in an argument. Vocalization, as Michaelson recounts, has traditionally been given precedence over even strategic silence, and “Moreover, this dominant metaphor has encouraged us to pity, ignore, or discount the many generations of women for whom silence represented a potentially useful strategy” (3). Silence is the position of the marginalized, and Evelina is continually silencing herself-- in the first half of the novel her silence is the submissive, powerless silence we usually associate with that metaphor, but in the second half we see a strategic silence emerge. The presence of silence is not surprising; in tracing the history of desire in the novel, Nancy Armstrong argues that “one cannot distinguish the production of the new female ideal either from the rise of the novel or fro the rise of the new middle classes in England” (8) and that ideal featured a woman who spoke to few, and certainly did not participate in public, policy forming arguments (Armstrong 18-20). In recent years, rhetoricians have focused less on conditions of silencing, however, and more on tactics for overcoming marginalization, even through silence. Still, it is important to remember that Evelina is not representing and prescribing the characteristics of all women’s speech. Evelina is herself a middle-class white woman whose story is an educational tool for other middle-class white women in England—what Kenneth Burke calls a “symbol” (Counter-Statement 152) which gives a “pattern of existence” (157), a template of behavior for readers to follow.
One such “representative anecdote” for speech and silence can be found in Evelina’s first conflict with Sir Clement Willoughby. Sir Clement is unrelenting in his pursuit of Evelina, who lies to him by saying she already has a dance partner. Evelina attempts to escape Sir Clement’s, but he continues his advances:
“You do me justice,” (cried he, interrupting me) “yes, I do indeed improve upon acquaintance; you will hereafter be quite charmed with me.”
“Hereafter, Sir, I hope I shall never--“
“O hush!—hush!—have you forgot the situation in which I found you?” (47).
Sir Clement interrupts Evelina even as she attempts to politely refuse. To escape the “raillery,” Evelina pretends that Lord Orville is her partner. Upon reaching the safety of Mrs. Mirvan, Evelina quits speaking all together: “I had not strength to make my mortifying explanation;--my spirits quite failed me, and I burst into tears” (49).This silencing, Sara Mills points out, has been the topic of most sociolinguistic studies of gender, it has become a trope of the gendered speech discussion to the point where analysis has been stalled at the male-voiced/female-silenced binary. Like Michaelson, Mills finds fault with the earlier sociolinguistic analysis that posited a normatively polite (evasive) and inoffensive female speech, “characterized as deviant in relation to a male norm which, by implication, was characterized as being direct, confident and straight-talking” (Mills 5). For Mills, this characterization is not necessarily the best binary to follow, since “many of these features, particularly those associated with women's over-politeness and deference, are in fact characteristic of feminine rather than female speech, that is, a stereotype of what women's speech is supposed to be” (5 emphasis added). It is precisely this prescription of behavior that Evelina invokes; however, the majority of Evelina’s polite silences appear early in the narrative, when Evelina’s “discourse competence” (Mills 4) is still unformed.
Silence is, above all, a phenomenon of power structures. Julia Allen and Lester Faigley analyze the various ways that those in the margins try to overcome that silence or work within it. For them, the written discourse of novels, poems, and even music can teach methods of subversion (143). Working with Burke’s idea of “perspective by incongruity,” Allen and Faigley argue that replacing direct argument with the metaphorical or euphemistic to be one way the marginalized can speak: “To say the unsayable, writers have often substituted one safer representation for another more definitive one” (164). Narrative, Allen and Faigley suggest, is one way to say the unsayable, to provide a different kind of “rationality” (167). Evelina is not completely silenced; she replaces her silence with talking about her silence in letters—letters which are compiled by “the editor” (Burney) and transmitted to readers.
Despite this early, silenced speech, the majority of Evelina represents Evelina’s own arguments as the correct approach for a middle-class woman. The second volume contrasts the way Evelina handles confrontational speech with that of her less-savvy cousins and grandmother. Her conflicts with Clement and her cousins provide ample opportunity for her to create and give arguments. Without the protection of Mrs. Mirvan, Evelina must speak for herself, and when she does, she begins to discover which techniques are more effective.
Such rhetorical examination was running strong in the eighteenth century; while the “current-traditional” theorists (Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately) formulated rhetoric as a scientific set of rules to follow, still others focused their attentions on elocution. Women rhetors, however, had the most to gain or lose from the stabilization of rhetorical theory and practice, and several novelists, Jane Donawerth argues, used their novels and other fiction as a place to revise, parody, or reject outright the tradition that Howell describes. Donawerth points to Maria Edgeworth’s “Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification,” in which “Edgeworth mockingly parodies and transforms the techniques of traditional rhetoric and thus resists not only the repression of women’s voices and powers in marriage, but also the dangerous potential for manipulation in rhetoric” (245). Edgeworth, like many composition theorists today, knows that the restraints and formulas of current-traditional rhetoric are dangerous not because they are ineffective, but because they are too effective; they allow no room for other voices, they posit a singular, empowered ethos, and they categorize their audiences absolutely (leaving women always as passive, ready to be told the “truth” by male orators). Edgeworth challenges that rhetoric, however, through satire: “In her treatment of wives’ defenses of themselves from husbands’ blame, she parodies the categories of voice taught in elocution, for her shrew has mastered the ‘petulant, the peevish, and the sullen tones’” (Donawerth 245). Even theories of elocution, which was rarely concerned with the content or evidence of an utterance, gendered the speaker, prescribing a particular pitch and thus a particular version of the feminine. Women rhetoricians were in constant dialogue with the newly established theories and while neither Evelina nor Burney does not exactly theorize argumentation, the text does, by giving a representation of appropriate female speech and its consequences, promote a certain version of rhetorical practice. In the second and third volumes, as Evelina perfects her argumentation skills, we learn with her what good argumentation looks like.
In Volumes II and III we are shown various forms of argument and speech Politeness and “decorum” are shown as important to good speech when Evelina comments on the Branghtons’ language. Unlike Evelina, her cousins have no faculty of “sentiment,” the ability to engage in “moral reflection [and] a rational opinion” (Todd 7). Sentimental women (and, to a lesser extent, men) were to have compassion and pity for all, which was then reflected in their speech (19). Sensibility is the outward expression of being affected by pathos, and thus becomes a property of ethos: If one is not swayed to sympathy, one’s character comes into question (Michaelson 186). Evelina is convinced of her cousins’ faults because of the way they speak. Mrs. Duval has none of the decorum that Evelina comes to have by the end of the novel. Evelina comments on the coarseness of her introduction: “The manner in which Madame Duval was pleased to introduce me to this family, extremely shocked me. ‘Here, my dears,’ said she, ‘here’s a relation you little thought of; but you must know my poor daughter Caroline had a child after she run away from me[….]” (70). Madame Duval speaks frankly about Evelina’s private legitimacy problem within seconds of the introduction, causing Evelina to be “shocked.”
The Branghton sisters are no better: Evelina’s letter portrays their conversation as idle “ceremony” (71). Their brother even comments on their gossip and chatter. When asked what the women will find to say to one another, he replies indignantly: “‘Say!’ cried young Branghton, ‘O, never you think of that, they’ll find enough to say, I’ll be sworn. You know the women are never tired of talking’” (188). In addition to being empty talkers, the Branghton sisters are, in Evelina’s opinion “abrupt” and in “want of affection, and good-nature” (172). Additionally, Evelina finds that their conversation “manifested equally their folly and their want of decency” (172). The lack of sentiment and sensibility displayed by Evelina’s relatives gives Evelina the opportunity to comment on such indecency, and to point out to the readers the differences between her own mistakes, which are “never willfully blameful” and which she is always embarrassed by, and the sisters’ brash conversation which they do not notice is uncouth.
Sensibility is also important to understanding theories of rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; what we now call identification and pathos became the central terms when describing how to “move” an audience. Evelina’s own sensibility endears her to Orville, even when he is suspicious of her meetings with Mr. Macartney: “‘My dearest Miss Anville,’ he said, taking my hand, ‘I see, and I adore the purity of your mind, superior as it is to all little arts, and all apprehensions of suspicion’” (364). Evelina’s purity from the “arts” of speech and rhetoric is a better argument than any she could—and tries to—give him to explain Mr. Macartney’s presence.
Evelina’s pathetic moments with Madam Duval show sensibility, but this is not used when arguing. Instead, sensibility and sentiment appear as part of non-argumentative speech. When Sir Clement and the Captain “rob” Madame Duval, Evelina pleads with Sir Clement to have pity: “—pray leave me, pray go to the relief of Madame Duval,--I cannot bear that she should be treated with such indignity” (147). Despite her pity and appeal, Evelina is still silenced quickly by Sir Clement’s relentless appeals of his own, and he interrupts her argument to stop his “schemes” to hurt Madame Duval, and instead Clement asks her to “be less averse to trusting” him (148). Evelina is not yet able to turn the conversation in her favor or to cause change.
Evelina’s character as expressed in her arguments begins to provide the basis of her speech. Because of the commonly held beliefs about the “nature” of women, a good woman speaker, to be heard at all, must adhere to the rules of sensibility. Her sensible character is as much a part of her argument as the syllogisms she can provide for evidence. Michaelson finds this to be especially true in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth “privileges ethos as a means of persuasion, while Darcy insists on logos” (Michaelson 184). In her letter to Lord Orville explaining that she had nothing to do with the Branghton sisters untactfully asking for his carriage, Evelina begins by announcing her shame and “shock.” By arguing that “I cannot forbear writing a few lines, to clear myself from the imputation of an impertinence which I blush to be suspected of” (250), Evelina constructs for herself the appropriate ethos for the situation. Her shame points to her understanding of what is appropriate, and the blush she describes is a sign of her true modesty. Her language is formal, as she knows that it is improper for a woman to begin correspondence with a man so suddenly, and the letter is short. She signs the letter as “Your Lordship’s most humble servant” (250); not as a friend or acquaintance. Her signature places distance in their relationship, the very subject of contention that is the exigency for her letter. Even her signature must be constructed with attention to ethos.
Evelina’s chooses her words carefully in this section because of how much is at stake for her. Norman Page provides a framework for understanding the role of character in speech in the novel. Although Page, like many others, focuses on representations of dialect in the novel, he does make a claim for a connection between the representation of dialogue in general and the presentation of character. Because we cannot see the character as we would on stage, Page argues, we must gather character information from the way the character speaks. In some novels, a dialect tells us about the character’s class; for others, word choice and conversational techniques provide characterization (Page 110). A character’s character is in part determined by his or her rhetorical understanding.
In Volume III we are given yet another counter example to Evelina’s newly acquired rhetorical sense. Mrs. Selwyn is perhaps the best female rhetor in the novel, but the novel’s attitude toward her “artistic” talents implies that she is perhaps too good at arguing. Sir Clement, the subject of many of Mrs. Selwyn’s comments, argues that she “afforded some relief from […] formality, but the unbounded license of her tongue—“ but is cut off by Evelina’s defense of her temporary guardian (343). Mrs. Selwyn is never polite, but is witty in her short, sarcastic comments and rational in her longer arguments to Mr. Belmont. To convince Mr. Belmont that Evelina is his daughter, she first meets with him briefly alone. When her arguments are ineffective, Mrs. Selwyn, knowing her audience, brings Evelina with her. She reasons that if Mr. Belmont is firm in his conviction, then he at least should “have no objection to seeing this young lady?” (372). Unable to find a reason why he should fear a young woman, Mr. Belmont assents, and Mrs. Selwyn wins the argument.
While the silent, uneducated response is not advocated by the novel, neither is the “force” (369) of Mrs. Selwyn. Evelina’s own comments lead us to believe that we are not to follow in Mrs. Selwyn’s footsteps: although she defends against Sir Clement’s criticism, in her asides to her father, her opinion is quite clear: “And now, my dear Sir, I have a conversation to write, the most interesting to me, that I ever heard. The comments and questions with which Mrs. Selwyn interrupted her account, I shall not mention; for they are such as you may very easily suppose” (345). Evelina’s father knows Mrs. Selwyn well enough to imagine what the woman might have said, but more importantly, Evelina does not find the comments worthy of copying down. To Evelina, the humorous and critical remarks do not count as necessary to the story, nor do they make for even an interesting aside in a letter.
As a contrast to Mrs. Selwyn, we are shown Evelina’s most effective argument—one in which she does not have to say a word. It is argument by face and demeanor. When Evelina meets her birthfather for the first time, Mr. Belmont is not convinced by the logical arguments and wits of Mrs. Selwyn. Evelina in arguing for her legitimacy is most effective when silent; Mr. Belmont exclaims “Yes, yes” and acknowledges Evelina is the true daughter of Caroline Evelyn. Throughout his shocked speech, Evelina remains “Speechless, motionless,” and yet has managed to “set [his] brain on fire” (372). Her best argument is simply her presence.
Evelina’s ethos comes from her heritage. There is nothing she can do to either improve or ruin it; her face, not her reasoning enables her to live a middle-class fairytale. Still, argumentation in this novel is not left entirely to the parentage of the rhetor. There are definite “bad” rhetorics, in the form of the Branghtons and the bad ethos of Mrs. Selwyn. From this, we can extrapolate what the novel recommends. At the very least, speakers should not be silenced when silence is an ineffective response to inappropriate proposals (like that of Sir Clement). Speakers should also speak politely, but provide enough information so that mistakes are not later made. Finally, speakers should provide an ethos appropriate to the situation; Evelina’s character as her mother’s daughter is the only appeal that will sway Mr. Belmont, and Mrs. Selwyn’s character as harsh and railing prevents her from being seen as the witty, intelligent speaker she is. Evelina does not provide a complete picture of a good female rhetor, but it does provide anecdotal tips to those about to be introduced into “pubic company.”
Works Cited
Allen, Julia and Lester Faigley. "Discursive Strategies for Social Change: An Alternative Rhetoric of Argument." Rhetoric Review. 14 (1995):142-172.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. 3nd Ed. Berkley: University of California Press, 1968.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkley: University of California Press, 1974.
Burney, Francis. Evelina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Howell, Wilbur Samuel. Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Mills, Sara. “Discourse Competence: Or How to Theorize Strong Women Speakers.” Hypatia 7 (Spring 1992): 4-17.
Page, Norman. Speech in the English Novel. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988.
Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986.

Revising my work: BSG essay

Written two years ago, with some parts I'd like to incorporate into my dissertation. Perhaps for publication?


Starting with the End: Battlestar Galactica and Apocalyptic Narration

Early Science Fiction (SF) television had few successes—The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek—and many (some memorable) failures—Space: 1999, Red Dwarf, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Battlestar Galactica to name a few. These failures have, for the most part, fallen into obscurity. In 2003, however, the SciFi Channel produced a mini-series based on, but not identical to, the original Battlestar Galactica (BSG), spending the four hour special focusing on the first days of the apocalypse that frames the show. The miniseries was so popular that it led SciFi to create its own version of the 1970s series; unlike that series, BSG: 2003 received a Peabody award in 2006 for its “parallax considerations of politics, religion, sex, even what it means to be ‘human’” (http://www.peabody.uga.edu), and it has continued to show strong ratings.

BSG: 2003 raises two questions: How do you narrate the apocalypse in a pleasing way? And why would anyone want to “read” a dystopic future in the first place? Gary Wolfe, in his structural analysis of post-apocalyptic novels, admits that “Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrative with a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimistic, such a fantasy is very much in keeping with traditions of millenarian thought” (3). The relationship between “millenarian” thought—the dystopian, apocalyptic attitudes that appear during times of social uncertainty--and our own postmodern condition is such that a television show that “perversely” begins at the end is not only unsurprising, but well-accepted and hailed by critics. BSG:2003, as a product of our postmodern consumer culture, narrates the chaos and trauma of a future apocalypse while remaining a pleasurable text.

The possibility of narrating the future has been taken up by Fredric Jameson in his latest book Archaeologies of the Future. The name of the book points to the fundamental paradox of science fiction: any written artifact tells of events that have already passed or are currently passing for the author, and yet for the SF reader, these events belong to a time other than his or her own, a time that has yet to come. Scifi, as many theorists assert, is never “about” that future time, however. All “good” SF is in parable form, an insight into the reader’s present (Suvin 5). Narrating an imagined future that is really the present in disguise will always be a complex venture when done well, and, as Jameson acknowledges, that when attempting to outline the formal aspects of Utopia (literary and otherwise), one must “confront the way in which the secession of the Utopian imagination from everyday empirical Being takes the form of a temporal emergence and a historical transition” (85). Utopias are never present, either spatially or temporally, and therefore have a built in reliance on cause and effect relations: if we read a utopian fiction, then we will see our world as imperfect, else we will never reach the heaven on earth represented in the text. Jamison reminds us that the perfection of any written or imagined utopia, however, is limited by human imagination (288), and even the imagined perfect future is only the present reworked.

What BSG: 2003 excels at is making the imagined future not only an easily recognizable reworked present, but making that presence present, immediate, and highly realistic. However, the popularity of the revised series cannot be attributed only to this high level of realism made possible through sophisticated special effects; we must also consider the series as a narrative that takes into account viewer desires for a literal revelation (in Greek, “apocalypse”). What follows is an exploration of what allows this story of the end of history to be pleasurable. I argue that BSG: 2003 uses the relationship between the story of our future as its being told and the viewers’ present time and narrative order to both sate and inflame viewer desires for revelation of the story of apocalypse. Specifically, the series uses an untold “story” that is uncovered through a fragmented and veiling “discourse” that appeals to verisimilitude, and thus the viewers‘ sense of import.

The Postmodern Social Scene
M. Keith Booker responds to Jameson’s earlier work on postmodernity by examining a strand of postmodernity he calls the “post-utopian” or the fall of utopian imagination (Americas 4). For Booker, the post-utopian is most readily seen in SF, but he implies that the post-utopian condition has been overlooked because of the low-culture status of SF: “[…I]f Jameson is right about the status of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, then postmodern characteristics should be displayed in a wide range of cultural products, not just in The Recognitions or Naked Lunch” (Americas 3). As such, Booker takes as his examples popular SF texts from Ray Bradbury and the like. Jameon’s latest work does in fact address science fiction as part of the postmodern condition, citing everything from Ursula K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed to Star Trek, finding that even the wildest u/dystopias are nothing more than “chimeras” made up of pieces of our own time and ideologies (24).

The rhetoric of modern post-apocalyptic fictions depends on this tension between what is knowable (the present) and what can only be posited from our current conditions (the future). It also, however, plays on our fears of the collapse of the social order, creating a desire for fortunetelling so that we can brace for the trauma to come. By appealing to the audience's desire for knowledge and control of the future, BSG: 2003 and other exemplary SF texts invoke the "Utopian impulses," that occur when we are shown a world different from our own, as Jameson reading Ernst Bloch argues (xii). While there is a sense in Jameson‘s work that all imagined worlds lead to “utopian” desires, we should also note that many postmodern texts are aware of those impulses, and take them into account, creating the “dystopian” end of fictions of social criticism. Jameson’s focus on the utopianism is understandable--after all, many ideal communities have been set forth around a general desire for unity, peace, and equality. Few “real world” communities (although we might here name a few religious cults or militias) base themselves around a sense of an impending apocalypse. Hope is a far more pleasurable and sustaining organizing principle.

What Jameson fails to comment on is how these texts--not the communities themselves or the ideas they are based on--work with their readers to produce a pleasurable experience. It is easy to see that utopian (and dystopian) texts show us a reflection of our own world and ask us identify with the fictional extrapolation of our current conditions, but to do so effectively and with enough rhetorical force, the texts must be pleasurable enough to maintain the reader involvement needed to make the argument. BSG:2003 accomplishes this by making the future almost hyper-present, using the cinematic techniques that create reader interest and pleasure in the immediate here and now.

Starting at the End: Revising the Apocalyptic Structure
The real-time feel—the “documentary style” that the writers and directors of the series say makes BSG distinctive-- of the series also shows us our struggles with forecasting the future, with giving dystopic warnings to ourselves retroactively (“33 Commentary”). If BSG is a history of the future, it is one meant to warn us of our own pending apocalypse—but it can only show us what we already know and imagine. The discourse and rhetoric of apocalyptic stories is limited by our past and present.

Film theories and theories of narratology provide a way for us to understand the pleasure of a rhetorically successful apocalyptic text. BSG: 2003 avoids the pitfalls of its predecessors by forgoing a linear narrative in favor of a discourse which reveals as it conceals, never allowing the viewer to gain complete access to the complete story—the events of the apocalypse as they happened. Peter Brooks, echoing Russian Formalist theories, describes this as the difference between “story” and “discourse” or fabula and sjuzet (Brooks 12). Wolfe’s model of the structure of post-apocalyptic fiction has five parts. The original series was half space western, half space opera, with Star Wars as its implicit model, both stylistically and in narrative. The program was popular at first, but as the novelty of the special effects and space travel itself wore off, the show’s ratings dropped. It could not sustain its intrigue with “flat characters and [a] lack of imaginative plot” (Booker TV 89).

The new and improved version takes only the basic plot from the original, leaving the “western” feel behind in exchange for a documentary style and theme. While post-apocalyptic novels have a structure that can, in fact, be seen as a frontier story according to Wolfe, as a television seires, BSG deviates from the five part formula that Wolfe describes. In novels, there are commonly five large stages of action: (1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final, decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world. (Wolfe 8)

Battlestar Galactica has most of these elements, but has rearranged the pieces and, as Wolfe allows, “The formula may be varied in many ways, with some elements expanded to fill nearly the whole narrative, others deleted, and new ones added” (8). While the miniseries can be seen as covering at least partially stages one through three, the series which begins with the episode titled “33” could be located at stage four.

The four hour miniseries briefly establishes the logic of the diegesis and the premises for the show: Humans have settled on twelve planets known as the “Colonies” and were living in peace and prosperity until their artificially intelligent machines, the Cylons, turned on them and began a civil war. The miniseries picks up forty years after “the Cylon wars” in the middle of a cease fire. We are introduced to the seven main characters (the newly instated President Laura Roslin; the Vice President and traitor Gaius Baltar; Baltar’s Cylon lover, “Number Six;” the captain of the Galactica, Adama; and his second in command Colonel Tigh; Adama’s son, Lee “Apollo” Adama; and pilots Sharon “Boomer” Valery and Kara “Starbuck” Thrace) and several of the minor characters on the capital planet Caprica before the Cylons attack, bringing a nuclear holocaust to all twelve planets simultaneously. The miniseries focuses on the crew of the dilapidated old Battlestar Galactica which manages to escape the attack because its outdated technology isn’t prone to Cylon viruses. The Galactica and a small fleet of the surviving military and civilian ships begin a long fight for the survival of the human race and the (relative) maintenance of civil order. When the miniseries ends, the “ragtag” fleet seems to have momentarily escaped the Cylons and are searching for a mythical 13th colony known as Earth.

When the series itself begins, the audience is dropped right into the middle of a new crisis (the Cylons have found them) without any explanation of what has happened in between. The first season focuses on the survival of the crew in the “wilderness” of space, with the Cylons on their heels—a continual chase scene. This chase is anchored by two main plot threads that eventually become linked: President Laura Roslin’s piecing together the lost history of the 12 colonies and her lost memory of the Cylon attack, and Gaius Baltar’s struggle with his betrayal of the Colonies. While these threads are the show’s main, controlling plot, as they were in the (slightly different) 1970s series, the events move slowly, giving viewers time to become invested in the seven “main” characters emotional developments and the slow revelation of what really happened the day the Cylons attacked.

The structure as I have described it here fits in with Wolfe’s fourth stage, but with an important change: the events of the previous three stages are returned to and retold again and again, as the characters come to terms with the trauma of the apocalypse. The focus is not on the events themselves, but, as creator Ron Moore says, on the “humanity” of the situation; we do not watch for the action, but for the characters’ re-actions.

In part, the series is successful because of its careful construction of plot. All of BSG’s episodes can be seen as following the model of narrative given by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot. Brooks, taking a Freudian model informed by narratology, argues that “Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification. Desire is in this view like Freud’s notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire, but larger and more polymorphous” (37). Narrative is also dependent on beginnings and endings: “The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending” (94). The role of the end is so important that “All narrative may be in essence obituary in that […] the retrospective knowledge that it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of the end” (94). Brooks’s narrative form, like that of apocalyptic fiction, begins with the end, and endings imbue meaning on the events that precede them.

To begin at the end, however, means that there must be a return at some point, to an earlier time, to a “primal scene” (Brooks 95). Like the detective story that begins with a murder then attempts to reconstruct prior events from deduction and clues, post-apocalyptic narratives begin with a scene of absolute destruction and attempt to re-cover human history and culture. Brooks, looking through a Freudian lens sees our drive toward narratives that retell primal scenes as a type of repetition compulsion, where “repetition works as a process of binding toward the creation of an energetic constant-state situation which will permit the emergence of mastery and the possibility of postponement” (101, emphasis in original). Each episode of BSG opens with a replay of the moment of apocalypse that must be bound: We are shown Gaius Baltar in his pristine home, ducking behind Number Six as a nuclear blast mows down the landscape outside. The shot is ambiguous—how did Gauis survive the blast? This shot of the nuclear blast followed by an exterior establishing shot of the planet Caprica covered with radioactive clouds. Even though the moment of apocalypse is given in the opening of each episode, but the reasons behind the apocalypse, how the humans of the Twelve Colonies are related to Earth, and the plans of the Cylons are left to be discovered through flashbacks and revelation.

The series also uses a structure of repetition and revelation in a strange, yet effective, montage that occurs at the very end of the opening credits sequence. A percussion-based soundtrack serves as the tension-building background to an otherwise silent montage of clips from the episode that is about to be seen. These images, have little meaning without their context, are not meant to provide clues to the episode, but to invoke the “end as beginning” structure within each episode: in Brooks’s words, “beginnings are the arousal of an intention in reading, stimulation into a tension” (103) which moves the plot forward and creates further desire for narrative. The montage for the final episode of the first season, for example, showed Adama being shot in the chest; viewers watched the show to find out how these events came to be and to contextualize the very brief images that serve as a beginning.

Documenting the End: “Real” time and “real” trauma
It is this discourse of revelation and re-vision (as we literally “see” the episode in montage before it is aired, and we re-see many of the events of the apocalypse each week) that prevents the new BSG from failing like its predecessors. The documentary style allows the program, as a whole, to invoke a sense of real-time and immediate presence. BSG’s attention to the relationship between real time and diegetic time creates an invitation to audience involvement and identification, which we see emerge from the first episode after the miniseries, “33.”
Cinematically, the passage of time is felt by long shots, large jump cuts, and a plot that revolves around time in general. Laura Roslin is dying—she has about six months to live at the beginning of the series, and her progression notes the passage of time. Additionally, many episodes in the first season begin with noting how many days have passed since the Cylon attack. In the third episode, for example, three of our weeks into the season, we are told that only twenty-four days have passed—roughly the same amount of time in our world.

In part, “33” and the episodes of BSG argue for the series’ verisimilitude by its stylistic treatment of suture. Suture, according to Kaja Silverman’s explication of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is a “slight-of-hand” which “involves attributing to a character within the fiction qualities which in fact belong to the machinery of enunciation: the ability to generate narrative, the omnipotence and coercive gaze, the castrating authority of the law” (232). By “suturing out” two of the three possible gazes Mulvey identifies—that of the camera and that of the audience—we are asked to identify with the third gaze, that of the (male) character. Fictional television and cinema work to make us forget the mediating technology of the camera and our own subjectivity as audience.

BSG:2003’s distinctive cinematic style, however, might be described as journalistic or documentary. This real-time feel comes from the denial of suture and a minimal use of montage. The camera’s presence is difficult to ignore: Creator Ron Moore states in his blog that he is attempting to create a cinema verité on television by using handheld digital cameras. This “verité” style leads to bobbing, constant motion; the camera is never still, especially during action sequences. In discussing the traditional cinematic techniques that create and maintain the primacy of the male gaze, Laura Mulvey argues the the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. (26) Battlestar Galactica’s movements are hardly “compatible with the human eye” and the despite the show’s attention to character development and human emotion, the “perception of the subject” is difficult to define in the series. The camera is always present, and it is difficult for the audience to forget their own position as audience.

The effect of the documentary or verité style can be best seen in two scenes in “33.” As the tired and increasingly ragged-looking Adama attempts to give orders to his pilots, the camera moves from side to side, never allowing viewers to see Adama’s still face conducting a gaze. While it is obvious Adama is looking at some screen to get information, we are never given a reverse shot of what he is seeing—only his half-open eyes which the jerking camera movements do not exactly focus on. In a scene where Adama is making life and death decisions, it is natural for an audience to want to know what he is looking at, and to establish a commanding gaze through his character. Both of these are denied, and we cannot identify with his controlling gaze because the camera’s unsettled gaze gets in the way.

While it is “nothing new,” as Ron Moore says, the authors of BSG: 2003 use an explicit split between objective and subjective shots to establish identification and to complicate the plotline. While many of the shots are handheld camera long shots that imply an objective, journalistic gaze, scenes with the psychotic Gaius Baltar rapidly switch between objective shots (which show Baltar talking to a wall or hugging himself) and subjective shots which show us that he is “really” interacting his Cylon lover, Number Six. While this often adds humor to the series, it also tempts the viewers to identify with Baltar as the traditional male gaze.

Montage, the use of cuts which sutures out the camera and allows our look to move around the fictional space, is used limitedly in BSG: 2003; instead, the show is comprised of several long shots strung together. The long shot is broken up by the constant movement of the documentary camera, which pans dizzyingly between characters instead of using a traditional shot/reverse shot technique which sutures out the camera and allows us to see more of the space in the scene. Instead, despite the viewers’ desire for more of the story, BSG: 2003 limits our gaze and our knowledge.

As Sharon (“Boomer”) sits in her cockpit, for example, she faces out toward the hangar. “The Chief” approaches her from behind, and the two stare out the window together. The camera remains on the pair as they talk about the missing commander Helo; despite the panning, bobbing, and weaving of the verité style, there is little movement of the camera around the space of the cockpit or what the Chief and Sharon are staring at. The lack created by the camera is made evident in these long shots, and the longer the camera denies us the reverse shot, the more difficult it is for us to identify with any one gaze. The “reality” of the verité camera work pairs up with the long shot to create the real time documentary or journalistic effect that gives exigency to the topic of the episode.

“33’s” real time sensation is added to by the subject of the episode itself: “33” refers to the number of minutes between each Cylon attack; the episode catalogues the crew’s fatigue, personal struggles with the recent apocalypse, and the relationship between the initial attack and Gaius Baltar’s relationship with Six. The episode begins with an echoing of a clock ticking, and a close-up of Baltar’s sleeping face. We are asked initially to identify with Baltar’s gaze and his experience of time, but as the episode unfolds, the focalization is complicated by continual shifts among the seven “main” characters. The clock continues to tick throughout the episode during moments lacking dialogue. The white face of the gear-work clock is grainy, and is a stark contrast to the crisp shots of beeping digital clocks that act as transitions between scenes. In “33” the clocks hold together the separate storylines, but also give us a point of reference for each significant “space” in the series: the Command Information Center (CIC), Roslin’s ship Colonial One, the hangar, the cockpits, and Commander Adama’s quarters.

Foreshadowing as Temptation: Engaging the Audience
Recovery and discovery of the “story” behind the Cylon apocalypse forward the plot more than any other element, however. Fans often note how offhanded remarks from earlier episodes turn out to be major plot twists in later ones. A specialized viewer-knowledge is created in these moments where memory of past events in the series gives the viewer a sense of being an insider, real member of the Galactica universe. For example, in “33” Apollo draws our attention to it in a lighthearted banter scene about Starbuck being “on drugs” and the squadron being “100% stimulated.” Sharon downplays her lack of exhaustion, but Starbuck interjects a brief “joke” that later turns out to be true: “That’s because she’s a Cylon!” Boomer is, in fact, a Cylon, and this scene is replayed in her mind as she comes to realize that she is not human a few episodes later.
The last episode of the second season of the show is a ninety minute episode that “shocked” viewers and left the series on a seven month cliff hanger. As more of the Cylon’s plan and Baltar’s betrayal became evident, however, the series began to forward the plot of finding Earth; little revelation was left. Many fans refer to this jump as “hitting the Reset button,” but it does not seem likely that the show’s writers simply gave up.

No doubt the audience responded as they did because their genre knowledge was violated. The series had established its own logical progression, but with the “One Year Later” move, seemed to break those conventions. Brooks’s claims of the inherent human need for narrative and the structures which facilitate playing out those desires (such as the detective story) provide a way to understand Battlestar Galactica’s narrative techniques and the final episode’s sudden shift of time. If, as Brooks claims, “[…n]arrative stories depend on meanings delayed, partially filled in, stretched out” (21), a narrative story ends when those meanings have been filled in completely, when the meanings have been “unfolded” (21). Through the first two seasons, BSG: 2003 effectively delays meaning and “stretches” the plot by returning to the apocalypse to “bind” the energy of the chaos. Because readers/viewers constantly desire a recital of the events around a trauma (here, the destruction of the human race), Battlestar Galactica (successfully) tells and retells the events around the apocalypse, discursively moving slowly through diegetical time in order to satisfy readers’ desire for disclosure.

“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II,” is the second of a two part season finale which revolves around the Presidential election. The episode resolves at least one question of the first two seasons. Laura Roslin reveals to Adama that Gaius is “working with the Cylons” or at least Number Six, a memory she recovered midseason during a near death experience, but had not yet related to anyone else. The betrayal is kept quiet, however; Baltar has somehow been elected President. What is notable about this is not the surprising election result, but that a science fiction television show could present two entire episodes centered on something as pragmatic as an election. The show, however, is not “about” the election; instead, it focuses as usual on the main characters’ emotions as they consider settling on a new planet.

The twist in the plot which shocked fans came at the end of the first hour, where the episode would normally stop. At this point, Baltar lays head down in frustration on his desk: settlement, apparently, is not going well already. The camera starts at one end of the room, then it moves toward Baltar, focusing inward and zooming eventually to the top of his head, actually in his hair. The extradiagetical music becomes percussion-heavy; and the camera remains instead still, for once, in Baltar’s hair. This position on his hair is held for a few seconds, then the screen goes dim. When it lights again, we are “still” focused on his hair, but he is being woken up for the morning, still at his desk. As the camera pulls back, we notice that the office has changed; this is not the next morning at all, but sometime in the future. We are unaware of how far in the future for nearly a full minute, when the digital text appears in the middle of the screen, covering Baltar, letting us know that one year has passed. The delay in positioning the audience in time compounds this uncharacteristic plot move, making it a disorienting moment on several fronts. Because this new time takes place outside of the usual hour-long episode format, the year seems doubly extended. Still, there is another eighteen minutes of show, including five minutes that overlapped into SciFi’s next time slot at 11:30 p.m.

In the summer of 2006, SciFi.com made the final five minutes available to download. While all of the episodes are available to download to iPods for a small fee, the “extra” five minutes and six seconds have been made available free of charge in easily accessible formats, as though these five minutes really were “outside” the normal narrative flow. This supplement to the show is both and ending and a beginning: it ends the former plot line (the Cylons have won the war) while beginning a new cycle of repetition and recovery—we do not really know why the Cylons have tracked down the remaining humans or what has happened in the one year of peace on the new planet. This jump was almost necessary, from a Brooksian point of view. The ends of narrative do eventually happen, despite the delays and twists offered by the “discourse:”

Our most sophisticated literature understands endings to be artificial,
arbitrary, minor rather than major chords, casual and textual rather than cosmic
and definitive. Yet they take place: if there is no spectacular dénouement, no
distribution of awards and punishments, no tie-up, through marriages and deaths,
of all the characters’ lives, there is a textual finis—we have no more pages to
read. (Brooks 314).

The series’ main narrative “ends” when Baltar is elected and the surviving humans settle on their new planet. Wolfe’s formula of post-apocalyptic literature says as much when it names a final ideological battle between good and evil that will decide the value system of the new world (12). Gaius, whose mind is controlled by the Cylons, wins the “battle” of the election and forces the humans to settle; staying in one place for a year is what allows the Cylons to locate the new planet. Once the narrative has ended and there are “no more pages to turn,” we would expect the series to end as well. Fan loyalty and market pressures, however, have forced the show to move on beyond its initial premise, and the final two seasons have moved on to searching for “the thirteenth colony“ (Earth) in earnest, and revealing the Final Five Cylons supposedly hiding in plain sight. To maintain the same structure of revelation and mastery of trauma, a new trauma and new unsaid events must be presented.

Conclusion: Concluding an Apocalypse
What is eye-catching about BSG, what is pleasurable and thus popular, are also what helps the show accomplish what all good apocalyptic/utopian/dystopian narratives do: invoke the reader’s present and present a causal argument. BSG is remarkable for its breaking of conventions, its trust in its audience’s ability to “keep up”(as Moore says in his commentary) and its narrative risks, but these remarkable moves are also sound rhetorical moves. Because the series is still in progress, it is difficult to say exactly what arguments about American society are being forwarded, but it is easy to recognize that something is in the process of being offered. Unfortunately for viewers and fans, the quick leap ahead in time in the show will be followed by eight months of time passing in the real world. The real world was given a chance to catch up with Galactica’s time and to contemplate exactly what is being said in all those gaps and spaces. Now we await the final episode, due out “sometime in 2009,” a promised conclusion to the post-apocalyptic scenario. The lengthy delay in producing this end may be that writers are struggling with how to conclude a post-apocalyptic narrative--thus far, this “final” episode is being filmed as a four-episode miniseries, probably to mirror the series’ beginnings. What we do post-post-apocalypse is a question rarely answered; the Book of Revelation gives us a new heaven and a new earth. It is unlikely BSG will do the same. Stay tuned.


Works Cited
“33.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005.
“33 Commentary.” Battlestar Galactica Season One. Writ. Ronald Moore, Christopher Eric James and Michael Taylor. Dir. Stephen McNutt. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005. DVD. Universal Home Entertainment, 2005.
Battlestar Galactica Podcasts. http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/. 14 July 2006.
Booker, M. Keith. Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2006.
---. Science Fiction Television. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.
“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 10 Mar 2005.
Moore, Ron. “Blog.” http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-26.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
Suvin, Darko. “Narrative Logic, Ideology, and the Range of SF.” Science Fiction Studies. 26:9 (March 1982): 1-25.
Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero.” The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 1-19.

"A Pirate's Life For Me": Narrative Theory and Online Fan Community

[Note 12/20/07: The final version of this paper will not be published here for various reasons--mainly because it sucked and I don't feel I'm saying anything we don't already know, either as fans or as scholars, that isn't expressed by the outline here. If you'd like to read the full version, email me for an electronic copy.]

Intro--the day fandom exploded. The event known as "Strikethrough07" can show us how narrative theories might be adapted to examine communal, asynchronous narratives online.

1. Narrative theory as appropriate for studying fan culture and fan text production. Bormann's Symbolic Convergence as a place to start. Fisher (and his respondants), particularly talking about the communal nature of all narrative. Ricoeur on temporality and (re)iteration. In literature: Peter Brooks (Formalism/Structuralism)--justify use of literature by pointing to a lack of other ways to analyze written communication that is neither literature nor tech writing.



2. Fandom--definitions (including overview of LiveJournal as platform), narrative nature of, and counter-hegemonic practices of. Citing Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Camille Bacon-Smith's ethnographic studies of fandom.
   


3. : Strikethrough07 as told "objectively" by news organizations and technology news blogs.
   


4. The narratives of Strikethrough 07. Examples throughout.
   
   
   1. Creating leaders, heroes and villans--this was the first task: "Whose fault is this?" was the first thing most fans asked and began researching.
   
   
   2. Time passage/speed of mythos construction. A single narrative emerged as the dominant version more quickly due to hyperlinking and copy/paste abilities.
   
   
   3. Genre of narratives of Strikethrough is quite clearly that of a detective story. Peter Brooks says this is the most engaging and most basic plot of all--an unveilling, a revelation. Fans constructed their narratives around this most familiar emplottment--because fanfiction is often written like this? Because it is the easiest to write? Because it poses the writer as Revealer?
   
   
   4. Pirates as metaphor. Fans see fandom as a whole by unifying under the pirate metaphor. They also see themselves as counter cultural (and thus heroic). They also identify with one of the major fandoms at that time: Pirates of the Carribbean, drawing on the newly released movie for inspiration, working issues of capitalism, economic dominance and hegemony into their fanfictions (which are usually just about romance).
   
   
   5. Errors and Rumors. As fans retell stories of their Strikethrough experience and attempt to hash out exactly what happened, accusations are made, unfounded rumors told, mistakes get made. The concessions to these errors are minimal, with most fans saying that the details actually *don't* matter--just the sentiment behind the actions. Which is strange, given the point above.
      


5. Contributions to narrative theory
   1. Concession: The particularities of fandom must be considered: Already a strong community, already based in narrative.
   
   
   2. Burke's symbolic action actually worked: By symbolically "flaming" the organization causing grievances (LiveJournal) fans managed to change policy in their favor.
   
   
   3. Strikethrough as example of conflict resolution through narrative actually creating a communal identity from disparate sects (Harry Potter fans met with Sailor Moon fans, Smallville fans met with Pirates of the Carribean fans).
   
   
   4. Strikethrough as catharsis.
   
   
   5. Introduction of desire to catalogue and historicize events through posting narratives online.
   
   
   6. Fans are used to open-ended narratives, to filling in the gaps, so it's no surprise many of the narratives simply stop around the first week of September. References still abound, but the fanaticism has faded. What can this tell us about other community narratives and their longevity?
   
   
   7. The genre choice is interesting, as fans are continuously engaged in "revealing" the subtext of their favorite texts. This could be one of the differences between spoken narratives traded among face-to-face community members informally, and the more formal task of writing a narrative that others will voluntarily *find* then *read*--there must be some suspense built, the craftedness of the story is more important without other social cues.
   
   
   8. Visual narrative-- narratives online are permanent (unless LiveJournal deletes them). Not only are these permanent, but online interaction involves a visual component that may have been traditionally filled with gestural language. Unlike f2f communication, however, narratives online are hierarchically arranged by time: threads of a conversation appear as replies *below* the original comment, and subsequent comments on the same "level" of reply are indented the same amount.
      

Conclusion: Proposals for further study
Strikethrough was just one example, focusing on fandom. But online communities exist outside of fandom, and create narratives as a way of creating identity (Cite Howard Rheingold and Nancy Baym). Anecdotes are the main genre of online communication, but how many of these are narratives that actually help build community? Is there any way to predict which narratives will hold in a community, and which will be just another post?
Structuralism can tell us a lot about the types that survive: Those with strong senses of heroes and villans, those that feature a quest for information (which makes sense, given the medium of the Internet is traditionally used for information-seeking). Further studies might look at how often comments on narratives are themselves narratives, how many times a given narrative is linked to by multiple users.
Continued work on three-d avatars has revealed software engineer's attempts to duplicate f2f communication--how are narratives currently created in 3-d avatar environments, and to what extent do these look like "real" narratives, and to what extent do they seem more like bulletin board posts?