Event

Louise Krasniewic

"I Wanna Live in Forks:" The Never Ending Movie That Is Fan Culture

Traditional approaches to the study of film assign the actual movie a role as an art object, commodity, text, social document, symptom of a psychosocial condition, or any number of other analytical positions. All this apparently disappears from the perspective of fan culture, or as it is described by Henry Jenkins, “participatory” culture. How should we consider the place in their participatory universe that fans give actual movies? Is the movie the locus of world-defining canon, or a source of visual inspirations for world-recreation, or merely background noise or wallpaper in a multi-dimensional universe populated with fan fiction, pilgrimage sites, “authentic” merchandise, websites, blogs, Fan-Cons, video re-enactments, and so much more fan production? Based on her research of the participatory fan culture that has been built around the enormously popular Twilight books and movies, Louise Krasniewicz will suggest an analysis and critique of Jenkin’s concept of participatory culture and the implications it has for Cinema Studies.