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Your Go-To Piece of Criticism: Matt Hills, Part 3
Jun. 2nd, 2026 06:17 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
fanhackers_feedToday’s post is the last of three go-to pieces of criticism suggested by Matt Hills: his first was for fan studies generally; his second, for Doctor Who, and today we get his last. –FC
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Lastly, if I had to absolutely and artificially name just one title that has cut across a huge swathe of my work since it was published (and formed the basis of an entire book of mine responding to its ideas — Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event from 2015) then it would probably come down to this, in terms of the sheer number of times that I’ve cited it and built on its ideas…
One Quote to Rule Them All, Perhaps:
different contexts of delivery and the paratexts that often provide such contexts expand the text, in the process offering different possibilities for its valuation. If “aura” is the sense of a text’s authenticity and authority—which, by nature, could never be an actual, uncontested quality of a text, only a discursively constructed value—while Benjamin focuses on how reproduction can lessen aura, surely we might explore ways in which reproduction might change the text, add context, “tradition,” and “presence,” and thereby increase aura.
The Two Towers DVDs wrap the film in aura; housed in an attractive, high-quality box, the discs are filled with explicit and implicit grabs at the title of “Work of Art.” (Gray 2010: 97)
It’s from Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts by Jonathan Gray (2010). Not really a fan studies book per se, but it sometimes gets treated as such, I feel. And Martin Barker (2017) wrote a journal article on how the concept of the “paratext” had become vital to fan studies in the wake of Gray’s intervention. In a sense, this work might encapsulate the first two academic texts that I’ve mentioned above - both of them are really about how fans consume, interpret, and commune with paratextual materials such as comic-con souvenirs or official magazines. Gray’s scope is very wide-ranging, taking in industry “hype” as much as fan-created paratexts, but I think that his ahead-of-the-curve turn to paratextuality continues to be indispensable for theorising fandom in our social media-framed, platformised, and algo-ridden present, where fans are constantly navigating, negotiating and creating (as well as trying to tune out, evade, or viscerally reject) worlds and whorls of proliferating paratextual matter comprising of widely differing cultural politics.
— Matt Hills (Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and previously Professor of Fandom Studies at Huddersfield University).
Poster: Francesca Coppa
