It is with no exaggeration that I am a born and bred classicist of literary theory and criticism, and by no stretch of the imagination an expert in the discourse of Digital Humanities and Rhetoric. In fact, most of what I attempted to digest from the readings are concepts completely foreign to me.

Way to date myself and then expect everyone reading this to believe I’m a part of this technology generation!

To say that I’m an anomaly in this fast-paced tech generation is an understatement, but grappling with these readings and struggling to determine how I could synthesize information so foreign to me returned me to my strengths. Instead of trying to pair my experiences with computers, phones, and the never-ending stream of social media, I returned to my roots: Dante.

It was by surprise to me that when reading Landlow’s Hypertext 3.0 – after reading both Bolter and Grustin’s “Remediation” and Eyman’s “Digital Theory” – he even used Dante as an example to introduce his segment on “aggressively active readers.” I had all but given up on understanding Digital Rhetoric when Landow referenced the literary tradition that surrounds my research.

Landow writes on the commonality between ancient literature and modern pop culture as the “reader-as-writer” figure (6).  He expresses the push for writers to maintain active readership and develop their own writing by using other authors as models.  In “trying to write like them,” new authors can master the techniques and rhetoric used by successful, classic authors (6).  This practice was so widespread and even revered as an art throughout literary tradition.  He writes of Vergil as having “read and rewrote Homer, and that Dante read and rewrote both Homer and Vergil, and Milton continued the practice” (6).  Landow continues on to state that “Literary scholars are quite accustomed to chains of active readings that produce such rewritings.  We call it a tradition” (7).

Landow further details the nuances of these rewritings through the years, using Jane Eyre and Star Trek as examples of popular works having produced a pool of readers-turned-writers in their endeavors to rewrite and remix the original works into something new.  What Landow describes of these rewrites, their digitization, and their “underground culture” hints at, but doesn’t quite hit, the mark of fanfiction.

I find this fascinating because just as Landow explains the blurring of the boundary between writer and reader due to the appearance and incorporation of hypertext (4), fanfiction almost totally erases that boundary.  Even Eyman expressly states that “Digital rhetoric…erodes the distance between rhetor and reader, producer and user” (11).

In this definition, the reader or “fan” becomes the author, and the original writer becomes the “creator.”

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Fanfiction is defined as: a type of fictional text written by fans of any work of fiction where the author uses established characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from an original creator as a basis for their writing.

In this definition, the reader or “fan” becomes the author, and the original writer becomes the “creator.”

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A question I would like to propose then is: When and why was there a shift in which aggressive reading and rewriting were denounced and declined in literary value and mass-market production?  When did rewriting fall to censure between Milton and E.L. James?  Why is Dante’s Divine Comedy “classic” when Dante is arguably the biggest Vergil fanboy to exist?

While just researching a list of published novels that were once posted as fanfiction, I’m also wont to ask: why did these titles make the cut?  And most importantly, if they were so good as fanfictions, as rewrites of an original work, why were they stripped of their established elements to make something new and not glorified for their mastery in “consciously trying to write like” the original creators?

It in this trajectory of digital media that I see strong connections to the other readings, especially within the context of remediation.  If we consider the definition of remediation as: new media that transforms older media, retaining some of their features while discarding others, fanfiction is a great example of textual remediation.  For the most part, fanfiction remains a part of the digital domain, encased in a network specific to the merging of fandom communities through rewriting.  It is a literary and digital form that I think has the potential to create a pathway further connecting traditional literary theory and digital rhetoric by revamping and reworking the theories praising rewriting as tradition and applying them to the remediated version of rewriting: fanfiction.

I think I just grazed the tip of the iceberg for a final project idea!  Dante as medieval fanfiction…has a certain ring to it that’s calling to me! Although beginning as a classic paper and ink text, the media culture surrounding Dante has far superseded that once solitary bound text. There’s been movies, video games, graphic novels, manga adaptations.  The creation of Dante-inspired media is widespread, and I am partial to the manga adaption and its effects of remediation of the original text.  Just food for thought!