Publication details
(Disputing) The Authority of the Canon
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Law is an authoritative phenomenon based on a body of text(s) in a wide Derridean sense: written legal regulation and case-law as well as various non-written interpretive additions coming from legal custom and practices, doctrinal texts and scholarly writing. Not all of these ‘are created equal’, so to say, when it comes to their authority, but all participate in co-creating the legal world we live in. Fanfiction or fanart in general is a creative phenomenon based on a body of text(s) in a wide Derridean sense: a novel, a movie, comics/manga, anime, or even real people or real events. They, too, participate in co-creating not only the world created by and within the original work of art but the cultural world those involved in fandoms live in. Strikingly, law as well as fanfiction are cultural and semiotic objects, (re)presented, kept alive and (re)produced by (active) participation of individuals. Both case-law and fanfiction or fanart imply relating oneself to the authority of the original – canonical – body of text as well as the authority of the community surrounding a given work. In my research, I am interested in how do the judges and authors of fanfiction or fanart relate themselves to the canon. To that end, I am conducting semi-structured interviews with both, judges and fanfiction writers. The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary findings that suggest interesting parallels in the critique of authority and reinforcement of power. |
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