Mary Sue

Fandom nie jest skończonym bytem, który może być odkryty i skomentowany, albo problemem, który można kwestionować czy rozwiązać. Jest to skomplikowane, prywatne, ale i dzielone z innymi, niekończące się doświadczenie 6. Sztywne definicje mogą stać się "fatalnym błędem‖, gdyż zawsze są niewystarczające lubco gorsza-mogą stać się wykluczające. Problem ten dotyczy również prób ustanawiania rygorystycznych granic terminu fan. Według Marka Duffetta "[j]akakolwiek definicja [tego] terminu jest aktem perswazji określającym, kim fani są, a kim nie‖ 7. Próby akademickiego definiowania fana-i przede wszystkim odróżnienia go od "normalnego‖ odbiorcy kulturydoprowadziły, w niektórych przypadkach, do namnożenia się hierarchizującej terminologii, takiej jak: fani, wielbiciele, entuzjaści, zwolennicy, fani kultowi-kultyści (cult fans, cultists) itd. Tacy badacze jak Brian Longhurst, Nicholas Abercrombie czy Will Brooker starali się przy użyciu tych terminów określić stopień zaangażowania fana w uczestnictwo w kulturze fanowskiej 8. Skutkowało to sytuacją-obecną najczęściej, choć nie tylko, w początkowych fazach badań nad fanami-którą Matt Hills opisał następująco: "[d]otychczasowe badania (…) zawsze zakładały już utworzoną fanowską społeczność i, co za tym idzie, zespół fanowskich «norm», wedle których fan jako obiekt badań mógł być ustanowiony i zmierzony (…)‖ 9. Sprowadzało się to do badań, w których próbowano określić, kto jest wystarczająco zaangażowany, kto sprostał wymaganiom, a kto nie, kto wpasował się w narzuconą charakterystykę fana, a kto nie. Głównym problem takiego ujęcia jest wkraczanie badaczy w prywatne doświadczenie realnych jednostek i autorytarne stwierdzanie, czy "nadają się‖ do bycia obiektem badań, przy całkowitym pominięciu prywatnie zdefiniowanych i wykształconych tożsamości. Trudności związane z określeniem, czy w ogóle potrzebą określenia, terminu fan są powiązane z faktem, że jest to termin niesłychanie szeroki. Jeden z polskich badaczy kultur fanowskich, socjolog Piotr Siuda, mówi o nim w następujący sposób: Być fanem-to powszechnie występujący kolokwializm. Można być fanem jakiejś drużyny piłkarskiej, fanem dobrej kuchni, polityka, a nawet górskiego bądź nadmorskiego krajobrazu. Jednym słowem używamy pojęcia fan w całej mnogości kolorów i odcieni, opisując za jego

Love has been a staple and chameleonic trope in literature that inspired poets and novelists alike since times immemorial, becoming one of the most pervasive themes in literary texts over the centuries. The traditional understanding of the concept ranged from abstract to more scientific and it has been theorized in fields of study as diverse as philosophy, theology, and psychology. In literature, love mostly appears intertwined with romantic and erotic feelings, but postmodern fiction expands its semantic field by experimenting with a new typology, namely metaleptic love. In Canadian literature, one twentieth-century novel that illustrates a specific form of metaleptic love by using intertextuality is Timothy Findley's Headhunter (1993). This paper argues that intertextuality is not just a marker of the postmodernist strategies embraced by Findley in his masterpiece, but it also functions as a symbol of metaleptic love and implicitly becomes a marker of ontological plurality.

Considering the fact that postmodern literature is an intertextual field which the reader reinterprets the text in an ongoing process, it is evident that referring to the past, particularly ancient myths through various writing strategies is becoming highly popular. Within the framework of this understanding, Salley Vickers attracts attention with Where Three Roads Meet, where she retells the Oedipus myth, published in 2007 by Canongate Publishing House. The author blends the ancient myth with the Oedipus complex that Freud introduced to psychoanalysis, transforming it into a masterfully constructed contemporary myth that oscillates between the fantasy world of myth and Freud's era. This study's primary aim is to examine Vickers' various narrative techniques in rewriting the ancient myth, particularly metalepsis. In this respect the study also focuses on the author's existential, psychological, philosophical, and fantastic interpretation approaches to constructing her postmodern work. Finally, in her metaleptic version based on the one-to-one dialogue between Freud and the narrator, this study concludes that Vickers deconstructs the myth tradition and creates an illusion effect on the reader that suspends thanks to the ambiguity and multi-layeredness composed in the narrator's core and throughout the account.

Some participants of popular culture do not confine themselves to a one-time contact with a favorite book or movie. Instead, they return to fictional worlds, creating literary texts based on original works and sharing these texts with other followers of the same pop-products. A number of these fan-made pieces contain idealized characters whose mentalities tend to be very similar to the personalities of their creators. Such characters, who are known under the name of Mary Sue, frequently become an object of harsh criticism all kinds of fan communities – most importantly, the rule of staying faithful to the object of one’s passion, that is, to the worlds created by professional authors. Apart from that, the paper demonstrates a concise discussion of the strong and weak points of the method employed on the readers’ part. The paper presents various forms of so strong a negative reaction and describes its possible causes, basing on the analysis of a discourse created by the users of Mirr...

William Gerhardie's second novel, The Polyglots (1925), offers an example-albeit an eccentric one-of the survival of direct addresses to readers in a novel written and published in the heyday of English literary modernism. The autodiegetic narrator repeatedly addresses the reader in a text which turns out to be a novel he is writing in the hope of improving the financial situation of its cast of characters, his polyglottic relatives and acquaintances. Ranging from short phatic expressions to polemical pre-emptive strikes against potential readerly objections and, in a final display of communicative exuberance, to a metaleptic exhortation to alter the fate of the characters by buying the book-still unpublished in the diegetic world-the addresses have a cumulative effect. Besides contributing to the overall humorous and ironic effects of the novel, they form an ongoing one-sided conversation and produce a sense of increasing intimacy with the narrator-author. In their most emphatic form, they interrupt the flow of the narrative and deflect the reader's interest from plot progression. Instead, they foreground the relationship between the narrator-author, the text, and the reader, this last participant in the communication triangle being probably best accounted for by Phelan's rhetorical model. If the term "reader" raises questions of definitions and ontological status, so does the expression "narrator-author" in the case of The Polyglots, since the temporal and functional demarcation line between the narrated-I and the narrating-I is a shifting and uncertain one. Thus, the intimacy generated by the addresses to readers on the part of the character-narrator performing the diegetic action of writing the novel and also calling attention to his physical presence increases immersion in the story world rather than jeopardizing it. Finally, it will be suggested that the novel's playful disregard for the principle of non-contradiction, evidenced most strikingly in the final metaleptic address, reflects the fact that the narrator is addressing future fictive readers of his yet unpublished book, therefore shifting attention from the writing process to the finished product and its reception. Since his novel is available to us through the reading of a real book, his references to "the book" are felt to concern not only his fictive forthcoming novel but also Gerhardie's novel published in 1925. At this extrafictional level, the exhortations to buy the book read like a humorous form of selfadvertisement and a reminder of the economic dimension of the relationship between writers and readers.

Since the late 1990s there has been a growing feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism has gone out of fashion. New works of literature, art and architecture are emerging that quite possibly mark the beginning of a new epoch: post-postmodernism. Concepts like protomodernism, 1 cosmodernism, 2 and digimodernism, 3 which are derived from criticism of some typical postmodern abuses such as extreme individualism, cultural relativism, nihilism etc., attempt to characterize the epoch from various perspectives and disciplinary approaches. Here, many of the new approaches to interpreting art and literary works are showing themselves to be more productive than the old poststructuralist ones. Among them, Raoul Eshelman's performatism

Z drowy rozsądek nie poddaje się nigdy -poradzi sobie z objaśnieniem każdej sytuacji, z interpretacją każdej wypowiedzi lub tekstu. Zgodnie z opisywaną przez etnometodologów dokumentacyjną metodą interpretacji (Garfi nkel 1989: 332-335; Garfi nkel 1967: 76-103) 1) potoczne rozumienie wypowiedzi lub tekstu operuje wzorcami interpretacji -schematami poznawczymi, stanowiącymi ramę odniesienia dla poszczególnych fragmentów i skrawków dyskursu (słów, urywków fraz, spojrzeń itd.), które z kolei traktowane są jako świadectwa ("dokumenty") trafności wzorca interpretacji. W dwustronnych oddziaływaniach między "dokumentami" i wzorcami interpretacji ustalany jest sens wypowiedzi lub tekstu. Wzorce interpretacji bywają rozmaite, dotyczą np. osobistych cech charakteru autora wypowiedzi lub tekstu, jego rzekomych motywów, społecznie lub etnicznie ulokowanych postaw, itp. Na wypadek trudności w zastosowaniu znanych schematów dysponujemy kategorią wypowiedzi niezrozumiałej lub chaotycznej. Zdrowy rozsądek wyposaża nas także w potocznie akceptowalne sposoby radzenia sobie z informacjami wykluczającymi się (Pollner 1987).

Fan fiction has received minimal attention from psychological researchers. In order to begin to fill that gap, this study analyzed fan fiction about the television show Mad Men to investigate how fans use fan fiction to make meaning from the source text. A sample of fan fiction stories was coded for the presence of eudaimonic and hedonic story components, the emotions expressed in the stories, the perspectives adopted by the fan writers, and plots that function as wish fulfillment. Findings indicated that fan fiction writers’ motivations were more eudaimonic than hedonic, that the stories often contained mixed or negative emotional content, that the writers frequently took the perspective of a female character in their stories, and that in some cases the stories enabled characters to achieve positive resolutions denied them by the source text. Taken together, the results point to the many ways in which fans engage with and make sense of a popular television show. Future psychological research on fan fiction of additional popular culture texts would be valuable for understanding the ways fans grapple with various elements of those texts.

Some participants of popular culture do not confine themselves to a one-time contact with a favorite book or movie. Instead, they return to fictional worlds, creating literary texts based on original works and sharing these texts with other followers of the same pop-products. A number of these fan-made pieces contain idealized characters whose mentalities tend to be very similar to the personalities of their creators. Such characters, who are known under the name of Mary Sue, frequently become an object of harsh criticism all kinds of fan communities – most importantly, the rule of staying faithful to the object of one’s passion, that is, to the worlds created by professional authors. Apart from that, the paper demonstrates a concise discussion of the strong and weak points of the method employed on the readers’ part. The paper presents various forms of so strong a negative reaction and describes its possible causes, basing on the analysis of a discourse created by the users of Mirriel Literary Forum (a message board which attracts people who are interested in amateurs’ literary pieces). The main goal of the paper is to demonstrate how the information obtained in discourse analysis may shed new light on the rules which govern the lives of all kinds of fan communities – most importantly, the rule of staying faithful to the object of one’s passion, that is, to the worlds created by professional authors. Apart from that, the paper demonstrates a concise discussion of the strong and weak points of the method employed.