| In recent years, culture studies has emerged as an increasingly popular field ofstudy, of which popular culture is an especially rich area. Taking fans as a research object,fans study uses culture study theories to analyze the process ofsocial and culturalconstruction, which mirrors the contemporary popular culture. An influential fan scholarHenry Jenkins proposed textual poaching theory in1990s, which provides a valuableinsight to approach fan culture.This essay takes the fans of the Big Bang Theory, a popular CBS sitcom as a studyobject, explores how TBBT Fans create a new world by appropriation, reconstruction,and circulation from the perspective of Henry Jenkins’s theory of textual poaching,instead of taking the meanings they “poach” from the text as the object of only limitedintellectual investment and discarding them as soon as they are no longer desirable oruseful, as Michelle De Certeaudescribes. The first chapter of this essay discusses thatin order to create their own world, TBBT fans select the raw materials that are useful,pleasurable, and easy to arouse sympathy, full of potentialities of recreation andarticulation from TBBT text, and then insert their own life experiences into them. Thesecond chapter analyzes that TBBT fans make full use of poached materials andcreate diversified new texts such as fan writing, fan songs, fan videos and so son toconduct textual reconstruction under the reciprocal influence of age, gender,education background. These new texts are generated based onTBBT fans’ social andcultural circumstance. The last chapter focuses on the interactions among TBBT fans,which helps to shape and enhance their reproduction and play a crucial role in theconstruction and maintenance of TBBT fans community. The circulation in the TBBTfan community creates a new world where the boundary between producers andconsumers is blurred; where all its participators contribute and articulate themselvesvoluntarily and spontaneously; where fan communication expanded from face-to-faceinteraction to international in scope; where all creations from the TBBT are opened to re-appropriate, reconstruct and recirculate; and a new world functioned as an utopianwonderland within where they can escape from the mundane. |
PDF Full Text Request