Text Poachers

The image of viewers of television series and other programmes as passive consumers is still deeply rooted today, in the era of internet television, streaming and content available anytime “on demand”. However, at the time the American cultural and media theorist Henry Jenkins wrote his book Textual Poachers (1992), this characterisation was accepted almost without reservation, even by experts in media studies. Jenkins focused his academic interest on one specific group of viewers—fans—and analysed their social practices and cultural production in detail, allowing him to fundamentally challenge the prevailing belief at the time about the passivity of series viewers.

In Textual Poachers, however, Henry Jenkins does not merely entrench himself in the position of a distanced academic; he also writes as a long-time fan actively involved in community activities. This dual identity, which is constantly reflected in the text, beneficially allows him to cast aside the dismissive tone common until then and to immerse himself, without trivialisation, in the fascinating world of fans.

The fundamental observation from which Jenkins begins his analyses is that fans not only consume films, series and other genres, but they also reshape, build upon and rewrite them. And not always in agreement: their texts often define themselves against the conception of narratives and characters as conceived by their original authors. The creations of commercial mass culture thus become the material for the fans’ own, considerably independent, work. In the book’s individual chapters, Jenkins focuses on the critical activities of the fan community, on the formation of their canons, evaluations and interpretations. Above all, however, he delves into specific creations: short stories and novels, including the controversial genre of slash fiction (erotic or pornographic stories about the male heroes of series like Star Trek or The Professionals), videos that cleverly remix material from broadcast series, and also the remarkable genre of filk music. All this is set within the context of an ethnography of the fan community’s social practices, from watching series together and exchanging recorded video cassettes to fan conventions (cons) of various types and sizes. Jenkins’s classic work thus offers a unique early insight into today’s all-pervasive participatory culture, which, through social media and other means, has become one of the most distinctive attributes of our time.

The Czech translation was based on the English edition published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book’s first publication. It is supplemented by an extensive interview with the author, in which Henry Jenkins reflects on both his former research method and the shifts that have occurred in fan practices and their academic reflection over the last two decades.