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Dec. 4th, 2009 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishIs there an unspoken rule that loud pretty girls must congregate together in library areas and chat near me?
Perhaps it is ineffable.
I am on page five of a 6-8 page final paper and loving the damned thing with every ounce of my being. Why? Because it is fanfiction, friend and neighbors. It's fanfiction.
The account of Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Avicenna was read by Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl, who then went out and wrote a much longer prequel that was based on ideas that he got from Avicenna. Among other things, he borrowed:
-The main character (or perhaps just his name, if you want to be a stick-up-the-bum kind of academic, but I'm willing to say he outright took the character)
-Several ideas about the conception of God in a mystical journey, and union with the divine as ineffable
-Descriptions of approaching the divine being blinded by beauty beyond the ability of the human eye to understand.
And this is my paper. I get to write about this one instance of fanfic in which a courtier in Muslim Spain thought that someone wrote a really cool idea and which he wanted to borrow. And that, my friends, is why I am a really happy little person right now, because this? Is damned cool.
This is what I want to study and write about. I want to talk about how people take ideas presented to them, and then make them their own by writing and expanding on those ideas in ways that the original thinker/actor/author/whatever did not think about and could not have foreseen.
I want to look at the world like it's fanfiction and talk about what I see in it. How people take ideas and make them from something outside themselves into something that reflects themselves, because nothing is new under the sun, it's only new to you, and making it yours is a fine and noble thing.
I kind of want to switch my field entirely and move to media studies and spend the rest of my life trying to get the Organization for Transformative Works to give me a paying job.
Ah, well.
Perhaps it is ineffable.
I am on page five of a 6-8 page final paper and loving the damned thing with every ounce of my being. Why? Because it is fanfiction, friend and neighbors. It's fanfiction.
The account of Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Avicenna was read by Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl, who then went out and wrote a much longer prequel that was based on ideas that he got from Avicenna. Among other things, he borrowed:
-The main character (or perhaps just his name, if you want to be a stick-up-the-bum kind of academic, but I'm willing to say he outright took the character)
-Several ideas about the conception of God in a mystical journey, and union with the divine as ineffable
-Descriptions of approaching the divine being blinded by beauty beyond the ability of the human eye to understand.
And this is my paper. I get to write about this one instance of fanfic in which a courtier in Muslim Spain thought that someone wrote a really cool idea and which he wanted to borrow. And that, my friends, is why I am a really happy little person right now, because this? Is damned cool.
This is what I want to study and write about. I want to talk about how people take ideas presented to them, and then make them their own by writing and expanding on those ideas in ways that the original thinker/actor/author/whatever did not think about and could not have foreseen.
I want to look at the world like it's fanfiction and talk about what I see in it. How people take ideas and make them from something outside themselves into something that reflects themselves, because nothing is new under the sun, it's only new to you, and making it yours is a fine and noble thing.
I kind of want to switch my field entirely and move to media studies and spend the rest of my life trying to get the Organization for Transformative Works to give me a paying job.
Ah, well.
