Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities: Thinking Through Feels (Palgrave Fan Studies)

This book argues that fans’ creative works form a cognitive system; fanfic, fanvids, and gifs are not simply evidence of thinking, but acts of thinking. Drawing on work in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and psychology―particularly focused on 4-E cognition, which rejects Cartesian dualism–this project demonstrates that cognition is an embodied, emotional, and distributed act that emerges from fans’ interactions with media texts, technological interfaces, and fan collectives. This mode of textual engagement is deeply physical, emotional, and social and is enacted through fanworks. By developing a theory of critical closeness, this book proposes a methodology for fruitfully putting cognitive science in conversation with fan studies. Acknowledgments 7 Contents 10 List of Figures 12 Chapter 1: Introduction: Body, Feeling, Community, and Cognition 13 Rewriting Stories and Bad Readers 18 4-E Cognition 22 Cognitive Linguistics 23 Emotions 27 Embodied Cognition 31 Extended and Distributed Cognition 34 Critical Closeness 37 A Note on Methodology 40 Chapter Overview 41 References 44 Chapter 2: Catching Feels: Fan Feelings, Bodies, and Communities 50 Fan Feelings 52 Conceptualizing Feels 61 Metaphors We Feel By 66 Conclusion: You, Me, Fandom, and Feels 75 References 77 Chapter 3: Living through Gifs: Embodied Cognition and Emotion 81 An Embodied Understanding of Gifs 84 A Feeling of Community 89 The Bodies that Launched a Thousand Ships 94 Conclusion: Casting Bodies 108 References 110 Chapter 4: Actors, Characters, and Blending 116 Conceptual Blending Theory and Compression 118 Bodies That Matter 123 Haunting Bodies across AUs 135 Conclusion: Communal Contexts 141 References 142 Chapter 5: Reframing Vids 147 Communal Ways of Thinking 150 Blending Stories 154 Embodied and Embedded Rehearsal 162 Cutting Together Crossovers 168 Conclusion: Performing Community 172 References 173 Chapter 6: Casting, Counterfactuals, and the Communal Construction of Characters 179 Knowing Characters through Conceptual Blending 182 Casting AU Fics 189 Thinking through Stories 200 Conclusion: Cognitive Flexibility 209 References 210 Chapter 7: Epilogue 215 References 219 Index 220