èצӰÏñ

Speaker(s): Quinn Dombrowski, Steele Douris, and Masha Gorshkova

The Harry Potter franchise has had a significant impact worldwide, with books and films translated into hundreds of languages. While readers and viewers have roughly the same point of departure (particularly in the wake of the film releases, which curtailed earlier liberties in translation), the fan fiction responses to that material diverge in ways that are shaped by shaped by language and culture (both national cultures and the community cultures of particular fanfic archives). In this talk, we will discuss how the affordances and conventions of three archives (Italian , Russian , and primarily-English ), and the languages and cultures of their writers, have contributed to differences ranging from rating and genre to warnings, characters, and pairings. We will also reflect on the challenges inherent to examining fanfic as a literary phenomenon — both in terms of the magnitude of the material, and the manner of engaging with active communities of readers and writers whose interests, values, and priorities may differ from scholars with an academic interest in fanfic.

 

Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and the Center for Digital Interdisciplinary Research in the èצӰÏñ Libraries. Steele Douris is a graduate student in the Department of English. And Masha Gorshkova is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.