Academia and Fandoms: One more time!

The study of the humanities has often struggled against the apathy of its students. Students who had no interest in the great author's of history and would instead rather be reading the newest young adult novel that had just come out, or were anxiously waiting for the newest installation of a series they'd been waiting on for years. The fandom culture is rampant in the digital age. Fans are able to connect in various ways that make distance and even country unimportant. Digital culture has enabled forums, chat rooms, fan fiction sites, fan art sites and even fan theory sites to connect together and make an entirely immersive environment for whatever medium the fans are obsessed about. The sheer size of fandom culture has grown in the past 10 years to dominate several different websites and take over a huge portion of identity within the digital age.

What does that have to do with literary culture? Everything. Classes have been filled with students studying literature with all of the passion that fandoms embody online. Teachers who have fallen in love with texts from centuries before that are trying to transfer that love onto their students. These are fans that haven't had an opportunity to participate in the life of a fandom because they are confined to a classroom. But academia often doesn't appreciate the comparison of their high end academic study to the obsessive and neurotic fans. But if we as an academic community could get over the stigma that fandoms are no more than obsessive teenage girls, then we could apply the love of literature to the study of literature.

If more classes were available for modern-day literature than there would be an increase of interest in the humanities. Academia has a stigma against modern pop culture, and often people consider poplar fiction or poetry to not be as good as the obscure. Many women writers of the 19^th century were written off by later generations because they had been popular during their time, but they had needed money for writing so their writing wasn't as good. That doesn't make sense, and it shouldn't make sense now either. If students had the option to come together and ask for a class that was focused on a book or tv show that they had fallen in love with, critical thinking, analysis, and study of literature would rise in popularity. Many people enjoy learning about stuff they like, and to restrict the study to only something that white men have decided are worth studying some 50 years before is damaging the academic community.

Fandoms are already studying content. They do it on forums and chat rooms, they even analyze important messages in their fanfiction. If they had a more focused medium, a teacher to guide them or help them create content that was polished and honed then they would be able to teach a new kind of academic study. A study that is more up to date with what is going on in our day then what happened in the last 500 years. Of course the older kind of academic study is still important, but compared to the changes in literature and the rise of popularity of science fiction and fantasy, it is falling behind.

Fandoms have the potential to become real academic critics talking about stories that people are interested in today. Not just academics who want to go over the same text for the thousandth time, but new content that is coming out and people are reading now. Tapping into the interests of the general public to create a real interest in literary studies and maybe then people would stop calling what we do useless and unimportant.