Official Course Description
The seminar deals with the fastest growing part of contemporary literature: fan fiction. These are texts published in online portals that continue real or fictional, historical or current characters and plots in their own unique way. Often, the focus is on popular series from the fantasy genre. But there are also Jane Austen, Karl May or Schiller fans who continue or rewrite their favorite works in this way. And there is fan fiction about celebrities of our time, from Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama to right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik.
In the seminar we want to learn to understand these texts. Which topics are particularly popular and what distinguishes fanfiction from conventional literature? Who writes fanfiction at all, and how do the stars of the scene relate to other authors and readers? How is criticism dealt with? Is fanfiction really particularly emotional?
We don't want to discuss these questions only theoretically, but we also want to deal with fanfiction texts themselves. For this purpose, we have compiled a corpus of works from fanfiktion.de. While we will methodically read the texts in the seminar, another course this semester offers the opportunity to conduct other kinds of analyses with these texts: In the exercise "Einfach programmieren! A workflow for literary analysis", we will learn how to digitally analyze not only individual texts, but the entire corpus.
The seminar will take place in-person.
The seminar deals with the fastest growing part of contemporary literature: fan fiction. These are texts published in online portals that continue real or fictional, historical or current characters and plots in their own unique way. Often, the focus is on popular series from the fantasy genre. But there are also Jane Austen, Karl May or Schiller fans who continue or rewrite their favorite works in this way. And there is fan fiction about celebrities of our time, from Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama to right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik.
In the seminar we want to learn to understand these texts. Which topics are particularly popular and what distinguishes fanfiction from conventional literature? Who writes fanfiction at all, and how do the stars of the scene relate to other authors and readers? How is criticism dealt with? Is fanfiction really particularly emotional?
We don't want to discuss these questions only theoretically, but we also want to deal with fanfiction texts themselves. For this purpose, we have compiled a corpus of works from fanfiktion.de. While we will methodically read the texts in the seminar, another course this semester offers the opportunity to conduct other kinds of analyses with these texts: In the exercise "Einfach programmieren! A workflow for literary analysis", we will learn how to digitally analyze not only individual texts, but the entire corpus.
The seminar will take place in-person.
- Lehrende: Thomas Weitin
Semester: WT 2021/22