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Toward Pop Literature | Online Only | n+1 | Olivia Kan-Sperling

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Due to copyright laws that prevent its monetization (and in contrast to the careerism unsubtly promoted by MFA programs), fanfiction cannot technically be other than a labor of love—though Y/N demonstrates how easily legible thinly-veiled references to sufficiently famous celebrities can be. The real problem with fanfiction, from a mainstream literary perspective, is precisely that its authors not only love reading (movies, music, other books) too much, they also love writing too much. And it shows!

Beauty, Elaine Scarry writes, is what incites a copy of itself. Beauty “makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.” I like this definition, which Scarry takes from Wittgenstein, because it also implicitly defines the impulse behind human creativity. As such, throughout On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry privileges examples of beauty drawn not only from nature, or real life, but from…

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