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CCPS Research Seminar: Sherlock, Adaptation and Fan Fiction.

CCPS is very pleased to welcome Professor Matt Hills of the University of Aberystwyth to give our first research seminar of this term, at 5pm in G50 of Millburn House on Tuesday 27th October.

The paper is entitled 'Sherlock, Adaptation and Fan Fiction: Dialogic TV or New Discourses of Fidelity?'. An absract of the paper and details of Matt's research interests are below.

All are welcome to attend. Refreshments will be provided. Please contact Paula Watkins on p.watkins@warwick.ac.uk if you plan to attend.

Sherlock, Adaptation and Fan Fiction: Dialogic TV or New Discourses of Fidelity?

BBC TV’s Sherlock (2010—) has been widely discussed as an “adaptation”; guidebooks have traced its references to the Conan Doyle ‘Canon’ and edited collections have explored Sherlock’s status as an adaptation. It may seem commonsensical that Sherlock adapts Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. And yet exactly what constitutes an “adaptation” has been interrogated within adaptation studies: is fidelity still significant, or are we dealing with Bakhtinian dialogism between a range of adaptations (Berger 2008)? Is fidelity impossible to gauge because adaptations work from, and reconfigure, an immaterial “meta-text”? (Cardwell 2002: 26—8). Perhaps we can view Sherlock as a game played with fidelity to definitions of ‘adaptation’.

Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation defines fan fiction against adaptation (2013: 9). But Sherlock raises the question of how these terms might overlap: it has also repeatedly been positioned as “fan fiction”. Scholars have pondered whether old binaries of power still divide showrunners and fans, perhaps making Sherlock ambivalent fan service rather than fan fiction per se (Maloney 2014). And Sherlock can be thought of as a distinctive programme brand, separating it from fan fiction, which Abigail De Kosnick argues is consumed via an “archive” of variants (2015: 121). At the same time that it attempts to ward off other versions in pursuit of brand distinction, however, Sherlock exists in relation to a commercial archive of prior adaptations which, contra De Kosnick, cannot be entirely blocked out. I will thus argue that Sherlock is a type of fan fiction not only because of the fandom performed by its showrunners, but also because of its existence in dialogue with a cultural “database” of other Sherlocks.

Presenter Bio: Matt Hills is Professor of Film and TV Studies at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of six books, from Fan Cultures (2002) to Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (2015), and the editor of New Dimensions of Doctor Who, published in the show’s 50th anniversary year. Matt has published more than a hundred journal articles/book chapters in the areas of cult media and fandom, and is currently working on the book Sherlock: Detecting Quality TV (forthcoming 2016).

Tue 13 Oct 2015, 14:26 | Tags: Research Seminars Events Faculty of Arts