No-Book Book Club

March 21 at 3:30 – Transformative Works

First off, what even are “transformative works”?

The Organization for Transformative Works (the group behind the Archive of Our Own) explains them in this way: 

“A transformative work takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression.

“Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and fan art.”

Fanfic is probably the easiest example of a transformative work, but the genre extends far, far beyond fan creations.  When Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat decided to create the TV show Sherlock for the BBC, they created a transformative work: instead of being a direct adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock takes the characters and stories and places them in the London of the 2000s, cell phones, closed-circuit cameras, and all.  The television show Supernatural played with this genre a lot as it went on, perhaps most notably in the episodes “Scoobynatural” – when the main characters become characters in an episode of Scooby-Doo – and “Fan Fiction” – when the characters discover an amateur theatrical play based off of popular tropes from the show’s fanfic.

In the print medium, when Gregory Maguire wrote the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, he created a transformative work based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Several books by Shannon Hale and Marissa Meyer are actually fairy tales retold: also transformative works.  

The first work generally recognized as “transformative” in this sense is Virgil’s Aeneid, which tells the story of Aeneas, a soldier who escaped the sacking of Troy and eventually founded the city of Rome: it was written from 29-19 BCE and is – essentially – a fanfiction of Homer’s Odyssey.  This genre has been around for a long time.

So, come join us on March 21st at 3:30 as we talk about the scope of the genre, snack, and watch a movie.

On April 25th we’ll talk about magical realism.

If you would like to attend and need accommodations, please contact me directly (edoherty[AT]ocln.org) so I can set them up. If you require a CDI or ASL interpreter, please contact me at least two weeks in advance so I have time to find someone. Thank you.