For my 205MAPA Essay, I will be focusing on an audience’s reading of a text, and how these readings contribute to the production of further meanings.

For this, I will be looking at participatory culture and fan culture. Areas of focus will be on how fanfiction is used both to create new content, but also to create lore surrounding pre-existing content as well as how an audience can be seen as more than just viewers and create fandoms based around the texts they consume.

My genre of focus will be science fiction as this is a genre which is synonymous with participatory and fan culture and will therefore allow me to have a vast range of examples. My specific text will be the Star Wars movie franchise (Episodes 1-9) as this is one of the highest grossing film franchises of all time and will therefore allow me to see how these ideas of audience participation and fandom apply on a large scale rather than with a niche text.