unjapanologist

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

A quick link to the presentation that kickstarted my Ph.D research, held at Kansai University last month. It's in Japanese, alas, and probably doesn't make sense without the talk. I saw a camera there, so I'll try to get hold of the video, which may or may not be more illuminating than the slides. I'm a fairly chaotic speaker.

(Yes, the presentation says 'Western' in the title instead of 'English-speaking'. I loathe the word 'Western' in most circumstances, but I hadn't quite figured out how to state my subject properly at that point. What I'm actually comparing with Japanese dojinshi is English-language fanfic. It's fairly straightforward to determine the nationality of a Japanese dojinshika, but that's not nearly so easy with a fanfic written in English. I did consider contacting the author of every fic I intended to use as a sample, but concluded that it would make little sense to divide all fic writers in groups according to nationality. It would be very interesting to compare what differences there are between, say, Harry Potter fic written by US nationals and Harry Potter fic written in English by Russian nationals, but that's beyond the scope of this project. I'm interested in how and why Japanese fanwork differs from non-Japanese fanwork, and because language problems prohibit me from comparing Japanese fanwork with, say, Chinese, I've chosen English-language fanwork. Also because I'm already familiar with that territory, and setting out on a project of this magnitude involves more than enough pitfalls without me trying to tackle as many unknown quantities as possible.)