The death of the author in the age of the internet: Fanfiction and the notion of authorship

Abstract

Fanfiction is a phenomenon that has existed for quite some time, where fans utilise narratives, settings and characters from other cultural products, and manipulate these elements to create a new narrative. Academic research into this phenomenon has highlighted several characteristics of fanfiction, such as the helpful communities and the space fanfiction allows for fans to escape reality, but a concept that has not been considered is the notion of authorship. As fanfiction writers borrow elements from other works, could they be categorised as authors? This thesis shall explore the academic background of fanfiction and authorship, focusing on the theories of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault that problematised the idea of the author, and combine these two theoretical elements by analysing the cycle of authorship, where the social, commercial, and authorship aspects change through four stages, exemplified by the author E. L. James, who started as a fanfiction author only to end up abandoning that aspect of her when she published her first novel that became a bestseller. The thesis concludes that fanfiction does not impact authorship as much, as Barthes’s theory does not differentiate between published authors and fanfiction authors.