“A commercially published novel is multiply produced—editors, agents, designers, marketers, literary sources, and market demands, all have their parts to play—but it comes to readers as a discrete book‐shaped entity with a single authored name. It is Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. Its multiple influences are not readily apparent on the face of it. By contrast, all the popular understandings of fanfiction I’ve referred to here rely heavily on multiple relations—text to source, text to legal right, writer to writer, writer to community, fanfiction to other fanfiction—and fanfic texts themselves often announce these relationships on their front pages. This relationality—these multiple sources, influences, and participants—is something we immediately understand as intrinsic to fanfiction rather than something we might gradually become convinced of by delving into French theory or studying the publishing process. The “we” of Western reading culture, however, do not primarily think of literature as an assemblage, and while we are likely well aware that books are things that must be assembled at some point and that websites must be coded for display on complex devices, this material assemblage is not what we have in mind when we think of “literary composition,” whether digitally or codexically disseminated. For most readers and writers, the work of literary composition is the work of the author, and this way of thinking about authors and their works is conditioned by Enlightenment notions of individuality, genius, aesthetic value, and art. Fanfiction both challenges and owes its existence to these same notions.”
jamison, anne. 2018. “Kant/squid (the fanfiction assemblage).” in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, P. Booth (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119237211.ch33
Fanfiction and Assemblage