Reading Authors/Authors Reading: Navigating Textual Worlds through Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On
Anagha Gopal
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 3
This paper examines the possibilities of theorizing the emerging author-reader relationship in the Young-Adult (YA) Fantasy genre, with reference to Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On (2015) and its fan community on Tumblr. The paper offers the changing parameters of reading as an entry-point into exploring the textuality of participatory web-based interfaces like Tumblr. While studying author-reader power dynamics, the paper marks the problematics of using the terms ‘author’ and ‘reader.’ It points out that not only do consumers/fans re-imagine the published text through fan-work, but the authorial-industrial complex also re-works the trends and concepts observed in consumer productions. The paper further argues that the politics of such ‘re-use’ can be extended to fan scholarship itself, and analyses the interpretive scope of primarily affect-based fan-work. A text at a precarious position between professionally published fiction and fan-works, Carry On provides a point of convergence to study navigations on media-interfaces.
Keywords: Tumblr, Fan-Work, Re-Use, Gift Economy, Author-Reader Relationship, Metatexts, Virtual Reality
Anagha Gopal (anagha.gopal@gmail.com) is pursuing her MA in English from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include young-adult (YA) literature and media, the place of fandom studies in literary criticism, and contemporary poetry. She has currently been investigating how form and narrative voice in contemporary American YA novels interact with the dynamics of media interfaces like Tumblr, Spotify, and Netflix. She spends her free time reading, writing, sharing poetry, and poring over web-based comics and graphic novels.