ENGL 5795 - Fanfiction and Adaptation

What makes "fanfiction" different from Shakespeare basing his plays on sources, or House turning a Victorian detective into a doctor in West Windsor? What can amateur, unauthorized stories about other writers' characters and worlds do for readers and writers that paid, official culture can't or won't? In this course, we'll be reading a lot of fanfic as well as looking at other cultural uses of adaptation and appropriation such as TV shows, web series, and avant-garde poetry. We'll look at the historical tradition of "writing from sources" and examine the co-evolution of fanfiction and mass media from the 1890s to today.