Letter from Leonard Nimoy to Spockanalia fanzine, 1967.

Millions of creative works have been published online, all passionately written by fans who craft their own stories based off of the media they love and enjoy. Of course, retelling and borrowing from stories has always been fundamental to literature: Virgil’s Aeneid picks up a minor character from Homer’s Iliad, and Dante’s Inferno casts Homer and Virgil themselves as characters. Other novels like Wide Sargasso Sea imagine backgrounds for characters from works of classic literature. The goal of our course is to fit fanfiction into this broader tradition of authors reimagining their favorite tales.

Our reading will include these retellings from history as well as popular translations of fanfiction into mainstream culture, like 50 Shades of Grey. We’ll read from academics writing on popular culture and fan studies, and of course no class on fanfiction would be complete without reading actual fanfiction stories.

As fanfiction has proliferated in online spaces, there is a huge number of stories just waiting to be explored. This class will work towards a final digital project where we will use computational methods to extract data and analyze stories. No coding experience needed! Throughout the semester we will build up our tools, culminating in a final project examining a large collection of fanfiction, looking for things such as character popularity or engagement through comments.