"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - A look at Textual Poaching

Poaching, by definition, is to take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way. As seen at the end of my introductory post, I used a gif of the Tenth Doctor to set up this next post. Allons-y - French for let’s go - was used as a catch-phrase by David Tennant during his tenure as the title character. I used the gif in a way to say let's go and get on with the essay, not let's go and save the day as it was used within the episode. While this phrase was written for entertainment and only for consumption; I have however interpreted and repackaged it in my own way, as a fan, to provide narrative for this blog. This is an example of textual poaching, but what is textual poaching?

Textual poaching was a term first developed by Michael De Certeau in his book The Practise of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau argues that audiences interpret individual meanings from media they have seen. This is due to everyone having unique situations and backgrounds. He goes on to say:

“readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.” (De Certeau 1984, p174).

De Certeau has interpreted the audience as travellers venturing onto someone else’s land of imagination, interpreting the media they are consuming as they please. Possibly in a way it wasn’t intended to be. Even now, as I type about what De Certeau has written, I am textually poaching on his field of thought on the subject. Interposing my own ideology.

Henry Jenkins developed the study on textual poaching in his book, Textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture (1992). Jenkins states “it documents a group insistent on making meaning from materials others have characterized as trivial and worthless.” (Jenkins 1992, p3). Jenkins is describing that the audience members who consider themselves fans of a film or television series take materials like characters, information, and laws and can expand on them. Fans make theories or fiction pieces, often referred to as ‘fan fiction’, and have full creative control over the characters or happenings within these. Fan fiction is a fiction written by a fan which uses characters from a popular television series or film. This is to them connecting further with the text, none the less this is a form of textual poaching. This textual poaching blurs the line between consumer and producer as fans have the power to interpret what can happen next to a character. Sometimes fan culture is controlled by what is shared to greater audiences over the internet. For example, Warner Bros closed many Harry Potter fan websites as they owned the rights and didn’t like fans creating non-official content. However, companies who own the intellectual property can never completely stop textual poaching as it is an uncontrollable occurrence.

Fans can create any content they like while sticking close or as far away from the canon of the franchise as they want because they have the control. Fans can create any piece of text from a franchise and there’s no authority that can ultimately control them. This work by all the fans is never considered as ‘canon’ by the producers of the show or by other fans of the show, but can it be?

In my next post I shall be looking into the concept of canon to fully understand what it is and the power it holds.