On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, HASTAC Scholars Stella Fritzell and Hannah Mendro met to discuss some exciting intersections between their work in the fields of Classics and Fan Studies. What arose was a fruitful discussion about engagement in myth and narrative media, questions of narrative potentiality and positionality, and the promise of storytelling and story-interpretation as liberatory acts. Stella was periodically joined by her two cats, Hermes and Maui, whose interruptions have been noted accordingly in the transcript. The HASTAC Scholars Dialogues Program is intended to forment discussion not only between individual scholars, but among the community at large. We hope that the content shared from this dialogue will inspire further conversations with friends, family, and colleagues. If any part of this discussion resonated with you, we encourage you to comment on this blog post to share your own scholarly thoughts and impressions. All comments should be civil in tone and refrain from using profanity or intentionally incendiary speech. Due to the length of Stella and Hannah's discussion, this dialogue is shared in three parts: Part I: Myth & Narrative Media Part II: Narrative Potentials & Positions Part III: Liberatory Potentials of Storytelling
About the Discussants
Hannah Mendro holds a master’s degree in cultural studies from the University of Washington Bothell with a research focus in new media and fan studies. Her research interests include the practices, discourses, and narratives in transformative fanworks such as fanfiction. Fanfiction is writing that emerges out of both a love for a source text and a discourse formed in community with others who share that love. It occurs in subcultural spaces outside of officially sanctioned engagement with media texts, which gives it transgressive potential, but in communities that often create and reproduce their own discourses, which can further hegemonic norms. Hannah studies fanfiction as both a text and a practice. The stories that people write are their own texts, contributing to a shared archive of work by other authors within the community and often forming their own genres of literary work. At the same time, writing and reading these stories is both a practice of community sharing and, often, a fulfillment of personal need on the part of the reader/writer. In her research, Hannah looks for the identifying features of fanfiction as a genre (or a series of subgenres) and the community discourses, needs, and desires that drive the need to both read and write in that genre. Stella Fritzell is a PhD Candidate in Greek, Latin, & Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She received her MA from Bryn Mawr College in 2019 and her BA from Carleton College in 2015 with a double major in Music and Classical Studies. Stella’s dissertation investigates the intersection of myth and landscape as it is experienced through the memorialization of fallen (mythical) enemies. For this research, “myth” is defined as a storytelling tradition that encompasses all instantiations of a tale as it appears across narrative mediums—including literary, visual, and oral—each occurrence drawing upon and informing the others in a manner that is both linear and retroactive in nature. Greek mythology is strongly localized in that narratives occupy known environments, and as such, myth both imparts and derives meaning from the landscapes and other local contexts that surround it. To engage with a myth, she argues, is to engage with the landscape and vice versa, and to understand a particular narrative, one must consider the contexts within which it was produced, disseminated, and held meaning. Outside of Classics, Stella works as a Graduate Assistant for the Digital Scholarship program at Bryn Mawr, where she provides troubleshooting, project management support, and assists in curricular programming. Stella is also an Adjunct Instructor in the College of Public Health at Temple University, where she teaches Aikido and Introduction to Martial Arts.
Part I: Myth & Narrative Media
Hannah Mendro: Let’s start with a basic question: what inspired the topic of your research? What are your interests in classics and mythological landscape? Stella Fritzell: I've always been very interested in myth. I really love stories and storytelling. That's been something I've engaged with since I was in kindergarten, before I could read, and then afterwards when I could actually read things and engage with written narrative. Then learning that there's an intersection between written and oral narrative was equally fascinating. And narrative is exciting, because it's a way of engaging with different things that you haven't encountered before. When it comes to the myth and landscape intersection, it's difficult to pinpoint precisely where that interest started. I've always been interested and engaged with making up stories about different landscapes that I've walked through. When my family went hiking or backpacking when I was younger, I would have little imaginary stories running through my head. If I was reading The Hobbit, I was marching along with the entire crew through the fields and woods. So that was really, I think, where that interest started, with understanding that something that is so fictional, that is so clearly fantastic, can be made more vibrant by engaging with landscapes that are in some way similar, or imagined to be similar to those in the story itself, and vice versa. And that has led to what my work is now. Greek myth is interesting because it uses real-world locations. In colloquial use, we tend to define myth as entirely fictional, but when we ground these seemingly fantastic stories in very real world places, they are, in a way, real. They're imagined to be engaging with the same places that we interact with on a daily basis, and that bridges the two. It creates a gray area or fuzzy space between the imagined and the real in terms of experience. And this is my major interest in studying myth and landscape: thinking of myth as something that can be experienced and not just imagined. Hannah Mendro: This is great. First of all, I love the way that you're bringing the mythological or the story into the real and physical. And I love your references specifically to Tolkien, because that's a world I've spent a lot of time in and also because I think that's one of those examples of a fantasy world that is very grounded in a geography or a built world. So I think it’s very interesting: taking these stories, which are grounded in history and religion and culture, as well as in imagination, and bringing that into conversation with fantasy, which is also very much in conversation with history and religion. I think that there's a rich conversation that you're taking part in here. Stella Fritzell: Oh, absolutely. And I’m reluctant to adopt one approach or to “take sides” in the scholarship. Often when we look at myth, we ask, is it standing for a historical event? Is it some exaggeration of something that happened for real, or is it a stand in for religion? Does it exemplify some sort of belief in higher power? Does it stand in for some sort of ritual practice that happened once-upon-a-time? Is it an allegory for a deeper philosophical idea? Is it strictly aetiological in terms of explaining natural occurrences or disasters? And it's never just one of those things. Myth is, on some level, each of those things. But also more than that, because there's a clear entertainment value to myth. The only reason why we continue to tell these stories is because they're interesting enough to continue to tell and to preserve and to adapt. So there are many different angles to engage with the question of story and imagination, and also of very real lived experience. Hannah Mendro: That obviously resonates very strongly with me, given my own studies. You've mentioned in your bio, and a little bit just now, that you spend time thinking about all the different intersections of these stories—the ways that we experience them, the physical world, and other aspects of human experience. I'm wondering if you noticed any consistencies across different storytelling mediums: oral or literary, or even artistic. When you've been tracing a story or a myth across these different narrative mediums, or even physical locations, are there things that you find differ widely? Or are there certain consistencies? Are there patterns? Are there certain narrative elements of different stories that tend to be trackable across these different forms? Does this question make sense? Stella Fritzell: It absolutely makes sense. And the last possibility that you suggested, in terms of finding narrative or stylistic consistencies within particular media, is particularly interesting and has a lot of potential, so I'll circle back to that. In terms of finding one particular story or myth represented more prominently in written or oral or visual media, than others, this ultimately depends on what our evidence is. Obviously, we don't have surviving evidence of oral narratives from the 5th century BCE. And we also can’t assume that people continue to tell stories in the same way—we don't know if there's current traditions that resemble the types of oral traditions of that time. Instead we assume and, I think, rightly assume, that when we possess something as a written narrative or as visual narrative, that there must also be an oral thread that belongs to the overall cultural imagination of what this particular myth is. And part of what is so interesting—[interruption by cat]—and really fun about myth, is that the wide-scale imaginations of these stories, such as the myth of Heracles or of Theseus, contain a number of narrative possibilities that different authors or artists can draw out in turn. So whatever a writer like Homer or Sophocles chooses to draw out in their poetry or playwriting is going to take on very specific attributes of this larger cultural myth. These writers may highlight and contribute certain inflections to the story, but it still references and belongs to the larger whole. Some scholars have referred to this larger story, this cultural imagination of the myth, as a “mega text”[1] or as a “story world”.[2] When we look at the individual authors then, and each of their successive, or iterative, or simultaneous tellings of the myth, and the nuances that these bring out, we then have to ask, why are they doing this? What effect does this have for author or audience, or for local meanings versus large-scale meanings? So the pattern with individual works of narration ultimately comes down to who's telling it. What that group of people or that individual author think is interesting. It’s the same thing for visual artists and their work, when we consider stylistic elements. But let’s turn back to narrative patterns within particular media. Now, when I look at a myth, I’m looking particularly at the central figure of a story and all of the smaller episodes that they are involved in. So, for certain figures there may only be one episode. For others, something like five. For a figure like Heracles, or some other major hero, maybe upwards of 20. And I have found that certain activities, certain types of episodes, will receive greater narrative attention in written media compared to say visual media, and then vice versa. So, for example, I wrote my master's thesis on the figure of Atalanta, who is a heroine. She has a couple of different episodes throughout her myth, and the signature of these episodes and her myth as a whole, is that she successfully competes against men in traditionally male agonistic contexts. She hunts with male peers and outshines them, and hunting, of course, is not a woman’s arena. Similarly, she wrestles against Peleus, an excellent wrestler, and does very well against him, depending on who is narrating the story. And, again, that’s a traditionally male arena. And of course in her most famous story, she wins against all of her male suitors in a footrace, except when Hippomenes resorts to trickery. And that’s once again not traditionally a female space. Athletics, in general, is not what we consider to be a woman’s space. And what I found when doing this research is that her footrace receives much more written attention compared to the other two main episodes of hunting and wrestling. Particularly compared to wrestling. And wrestling receives significantly more attention in visual media, whereas the footrace receives almost none. And part of that, I think, is how we conceptualize narrative around movement. When we think of a race, it's very much a linear movement through space and time. And when we're reading a text, we automatically have to set everything in order. We move from Point A to Point B through a series of steps. The text mimics the linearity of the race. And it works very, very well. But wrestling doesn’t have this linear sense of space and time. It stays within a space, even if time is progressing, so it becomes difficult to narrate in writing in a way that organically represents the action. But in visual representations of a wrestling match, like on a vase painting, we just need to fill the surface with action. Even a static image of a maneuver—a throw, or pin, or kick—is still suggestive of things that happen before or after that movement, but we understand all of this as actively taking place within one space. That’s actually something that I’ve explored a bit more after writing my master’s thesis.[3] It was a really interesting thing to observe, and to realize, that we know almost nothing of this very cool episode in myth because it’s received so little written attention compared to the visual attention that it’s been given. Hannah Mendro: This is fascinating. You blew my mind with this conceptualization of linear time in a race versus the sort of physical space dynamism of wrestling; this is going to stick with me. But I also love everything that you just said, and I feel so many resonances with my own work, especially in this notion of who is telling the story and who is taking which bits of the story to retell, which is so very prominent in all studies of fandom and fanfiction, which is where I spend my time. And I'm now interested in seeing if there are elements of, say, a source visual text that get pulled out more in fanfiction versus other elements that get pulled out more in fan videos or fan films or AMVs, where people will stitch together scenes from a movie or TV show set to music. A comparison of this space where people are taking what's there in that form of media (visual clips) and reimagining it, as opposed to taking what isn't there and writing their own imagining of it. I don’t know what I might find with this, but it would be a fascinating research topic! Of course as you’re talking I'm thinking about my own work as well as yours, and I’m fascinated by this question of oral history not being there, or of our not having much of a record and needing to fill things in based on what we do have. And what's interesting is that while ostensibly fanfiction, which is what I study, tends to be text based, I've read arguments for thinking about it as a form of oral culture, partially because so much of it takes place on the internet where links die and stories disappear. And you’re left with spaces imagined to have been there, that you have to piece together based on what exists now and what people are saying about it. It's not exactly the same thing, but there are some real resonances. I haven’t done a lot of that kind of study myself, but I’m fascinated to think about that. I'm thinking, too, about the question of Atalanta: what people are focusing on, and even that question about how well she does in wrestling, depending on who's telling the story. I've been working a little bit lately on some semi—I hesitate to say autoethnographic, because even that feels too intentionally methodological—but I’ve been thinking about the practice of writing fanfiction based very specifically on the situation that I was in at the time and what I needed from the text, and what that led me to transform the text into. One of my favorite fan scholars, Abigail de Kosnik, talks a lot about how fanfiction is meant to be read as an archive and as a collection of things (as opposed to one thing) that are all in conversation with each other.[4] And the way you're talking about myth is really pulling out those resonances for me. If you're thinking about looking at these different stories as a shared archive, or as a shared repertoire—to pull in some Diana Taylor performance theory[5]—around the same source, I think that there's so much relationship between our studies and forms of storytelling in that way. Stella Fritzell: I absolutely agree. And I have had similar conversations with other Classicists in informal settings. Don't mention this to any of the “core pillars” of academia or of the classical Western canon, but myth is essentially fanfiction. That's really what it is and how it operates, though I suppose you wouldn't say that it's around a central text, but that it operates around a central imagination of what this story or these figures of the story are, and what they could be, and what possibilities that then invokes. So even though we don't have a record of Atalanta, say, beating someone in a boat race, it would be believable if someone wrote that story, because it's a competitive arena and we have some authors listing her among the Argonauts. And the Argonautica is a boat journey. So why shouldn't she beat someone in a boat race or something similar? So you've really hit the nail on the head that myth operates in a very similar way to fanfiction. It's really neat.
This dialogue is continued in Part II: Narrative Potentials and Positions.
Notes: [1] On "mega text" see Segal, C. 1986. "Greek Myth as a Semiotic and Structural System and the Problem of Tragedy". Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text. Cornell University. 48-74. [2] On "story world" see Johnston, Sarah Iles. 2018. The Story of Myth. Harvard University Press. [3] Fritzell, Stella. 2021. "Imagining Temporal & Spatial Momentum: Considering Literary Predisposition Towards Race-type Narrative". Perspectivas sobre la manipulación de expectativas en la poesía griega, Perspectivas jóvenes del mundo antiguo grecolatino, vol. 2, eds. Luisina Abrach & Alejandro Abritta. EDUCO. 17-46. [4] De Kosnik, A. 2015. "'Fifty Shades' and the Archive of Women's Culture". Cinema Journal, 54.3: 116–125. [5] Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Duke University Press.
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