Students write about Jane Austen in popular culture
On this blog, students working on Jane Austen can use their developing critical skills to explore, analyse, share and enjoy their discoveries in the world of Jane Austen-influenced popular culture. They will post about any Austen-influenced subject matter they like, ranging from Jane Austen sequel novels to Internet communities to gratuitous references to Mr Darcy in otherwise unrelated news stories. In 2008 participating in this blog is a voluntary activity for RJA students.
Fans, cults, common readers, and the Jane Austen Industry
Only a handful of writers attract the kind of devotion, reinvention, publicity, and exploitation that Jane Austen receives. Few of these writers are people who died centuries ago, and even fewer have equally strong followings among professional and lay readers. In fact, Austen may be the only writer whose work is equally at home in popular and high cultural settings, is in the public domain yet continues to make money for publishers, and who regularly receives obsessively detailed and minute attention from people who call themselves ‘fans’ and people who call themselves ’scholars.’
Rethinking Jane Austen is a literary studies course and students undertaking it study Austen and her works in a scholarly way – paying close attention to the novels, and researching, reading and critiquing academic scholarship. But because of Jane Austen’s unique position as a writer who is at once popular and canonical, they are also encouraged to explore ‘popular’, ‘fan’, ‘mass culture’ responses to her writing and to engage with fan responses using the same respect and scrutiny they apply to scholarly reading material. Ideally students will find common ground between the scholarly work they study in their course and the fan work they write about here.
Why do it on a blog?
Students come to university to develop skills such as critical thinking and effective communication. In the Web 2.0 world, the ability to write engagingly for an actively participating, real world readership is essential. As students who take part will soon discover, there is much pleasure and excitement to be had from writing for a wide audience that is interested in your subject matter. It also seems important that students writing about fandoms should do it by a method that allows fans to engage, communicate, and generally ‘talk back’ via the comment box. And finally, the public format of the blog means students can share their work with networks outside their own university community.
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