Course Number: FAN2021
Course Title: Fan Culture and Media Reception
Instructor: Noemi Nunez
Email: noemin@knights.ucf.edu
Office Hours: By Appointment
Course Description
This course focuses on understanding the ways in which dynamic story worlds influence our perception and consumption of narratives. We will examine how these worlds are presented to audiences, as well as the ways in which industries, creators, and audiences interact with and influence these worlds. Exploring the sociocultural importance of various narratives facilitates critical participatory accountability and responsibility, as well as a critical awareness of the consumer materiality surrounding us.
Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, this course critically examines the ways in which we understand the production, distribution, and consumption of popular story worlds across written texts, film and television, and gaming media.
This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life.
Course Objectives
- Reflect critically on the history of fan studies and the continued growth of fandoms in the convergent media environment.
- Demonstrate an understanding of key fan theories and current debates in fan studies.
- Describe, analyze, and critique different types of fan practices and fan-produced media content.
- Create a piece of fan work as part of a fandom or fan community.
Required Readings
- Rukmini Pande (ed.) Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).
- Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020).
- Mel Stanfill, 2011, “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom,” in Robin Anne Reid and Sarah Gatson (eds.), “Race and Ethnicity in Fandom,” Transformative Works and Cultures 8 (special issue), 2011, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/256.