TODAY’S WORKSPACE. In my opinion, the best sort of academic freedom is freedom of movement.

One idea I’ve been toying with—not without a touch of delicious deviousness—is allowing students in literature courses to write fan fiction, rather than writing criticism.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing criticism, right? “Performing close readings,” and “building a cogent thesis” is all good fun, and we all know how quickly and with what eagerness students take up the whole business.

Even so, over the past few years I haven’t been able to help noticing that, as mature specimens of literary criticism have piled up on remote library shelves and in thickly-encrypted online databases like JSTOR and Project Muse (strongholds which, I’m certain, hordes of criticism-starved hackers are right now furiously sieging)—that all the while another sort of written genre is being circulated among the masses of “casual readers” that literary critics so often invoke (often so that they may correct those readers’ misinterpretations and oversights).

Like literary criticism, fan fiction is a written response to a text. However, instead of rationally arguing for a certain interpretation of that text, fan fiction…well, plays with it. A given piece of fan fic may imagine “deleted scenes” or characters not depicted in the original text, so that we can read about a secret kiss that happened between Harry Potter and his friend Ron during the Quidditch World Cup; it may extend the narrative, sequel or prequel-style; it may remix the world of the text with elements from other texts, so that we discover there are werewolves dwelling among the swamps of Dagobah.

Sound dumb? Indulgent? Promiscuous? To those of us who have been professionally to produce tightly-argued literary criticism, it certainly does. And surely many pieces of fan fiction offer nothing than a couple of hours of “play” to a writer and maybe a fun read for friend or two. But personally I find it increasingly hard to ignore that fan fiction, this other genre of textual response that is so unlike what we do, has flourished so brilliantly, and so organically, without any of the institutional support afforded to lit crit. That people energetically write it—and read it, without its being assigned. There has to be something vital there, something that we as teachers of literature could tap into, if not outright steal.

So what does fan fic have to offer that lit crit does not? I’m not sure I can articulate this yet, but it has something to do with what Nietzche talks about in “On Truth & Lies.” Nietzche, in the passage that Dan posted, suggests that art plays a very important role in shaping how we see the world, even if that role is a destructive one. Each of us creates a “web of concepts,” Nietzche says, a rational and more or less rigid way of seeing the world. The importance of art, then, is to productively tear those concepts down, to mulch them, so that we can once again see the world, instead of just the concepts.

It is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.

What does this have to do with fan fic? This is, of course, to simplify things, but I think we can all agree that to ask students for literary criticism is to ask them to create a rational, conceptual way of reading a text. This may have its own good use—in training students to make sound arguments, for example—but what fan fic suggests is that there are other meaningful ways to respond to a text, ways that align more closely with how most people read in their private lives.

Maybe it all boils down to this: fan fic allows the writer to create a response without brutally colonizing what Nietzche might call fertile “dream”scape that the work of art creates. Isn’t this exactly what undergrads complain that they’ve lost, when forced to write literary criticism? Isn’t this what professional literary critics are talking about, when they lament that they can no longer read “for fun”? It’s not that English professors and grad students don’t read what they want, it’s that they don’t read how they want. Maybe we can give that experience back to our students, at least, by giving them the chance to respond creatively, rather than critically.

I can imagine countless objections, of course. For example, shouldn’t we be teaching students to be active readers, able to resist the warp and woof of the text, so that they can form their own ideas, rather than being sucked in? But if I respond to these, I am being drawn into a battleground where I will surely lose the fight, a battleground populated by powerful “webs of concepts.” Instead of a rational response, then, I offer only this…

He was perhaps halfway through the sentence, halfway through the words that might have at last captured his winged thought, when Frederich Nietzche began to cough. “Scheisse,” he cursed as the coughing bent him over, the whiskers of his mustache scraping the half-empty page he now despaired of filling before dark. On the desk beside his pen and ink was a thumb-worn novel, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which earlier that day had set Frederich’s mind spinning. Now as the sun fell behind the impossible angles of the Swiss mountains, and Frederich’s coughing finally subsided, he knew he hadn’t the strength, hadn’t the will—damn it—to continue. For the sake of his health, he would finish this thought, then retire. He raised the shivering pen one last time and, yes, followed the trail his sentence—his thesis statement—which was, he decided when it was at last completed, admirably “cogent”:

“The primary theme of Crime and Punishment is alienation, which is shown through stilted dialogue, imagery of isolation, and an abstruse prose style.”

Provocative piece by psychologist Paul Bloom about why we’re so captivated by the fictions of the imagination—why we often prefer the pretend to the real. Pretty depressing stuff, actually. But I think what Bloom misses (unsurprisingly, considering he is a psychologist) are the social uses of the imagination. More on this later.

Some more reasons to feel bad about loving “Lost.” A really provocative reading of the finale & its fan-fare.

Fellow bloggers:

Has writing a blog led you to do some surprising things? Odd little things you mightn’t have done otherwise? Food bloggers, I expect you’ve tried some odd recipes, just so you could write about them. Photo bloggers, you probably snap a lot of “bloggy” pics that you never would have snapped as a private citizen.  Erotic bloggers…well, you get the point. 

Okay, so maybe blogging hasn’t led you to do strange bloggy things. But don’t tell me you’ve never gone out of your way to do something bizarre or funny or provocative just so that you could share it as your Facebook status. I’ll be the first to confess…Yes, I once cracked open an ice-cold PBR so that I could declare to my Fb friends that I was drinking whilst reading a temperance novel.

Anyway, what I’m trying to suggest here is this—

What we write affects what we do, how we think, and what we notice.

Would we have bloggy thoughts or do bloggy things if there weren’t blogs? If there weren’t complaint letters, would we get as indignant when our Reeboks shrunk?

Reading about theories of genre has led me to think about the relationship between 1) established forms of writing and 2) the workings of the individual mind.

Usually, we tend to think about the relationship between genre and the individual mind as being something like the relationship between jello and mold. The individual mind bubbles and froths and spews forth genius (that is, original thought). This original thought is then poured into the mold of genre, supposedly so that it can be more readily understood by readers. Genius, it is assumed, goes down easier if poured into a familiar form.

But what if we think about genre as being prior to genius? What if the mold helps to create the jello? What if the blog creates the blogger? This, I think, is what I was gesturing towards when I suggested that there might be a social (and discursive) component to interest. Fellow academics will confirm that a big part of our training as apprentice-scholars is genre-based. In grad school we learn what sorts of things we can make arguments about, and what types of claims we can make in articles, dissertations, conference papers. It is only once we cognitively inhabit & internalize these genres are we recognized as part of the community of scholars, and it is only once we inhabit & internalize these genres do we begin to “think like a scholar”: noticing and valuing things we would never have noticed, had we not internalized the logic of these genres.

According to this view of genre and the individual mind, it would seem that our ”interests” (our desires to know) are in part created and constrained by established forms of thought and expression, including written genres. 

There’s clearly more to be said here about the social components of genre, some of which are a bit disturbing. Is there any place for individual genius in a genre-based theory of rhetoric? If we accept that genre structures thought, do we also accept that it polices and censors thought? Do we end up, then, with a theory of genre that demands rhetors assimilate their habits of writing and thinking to arbitrary standards of the community? Are we being written by genre?