Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities

1 Introduction: Body, Feeling, Community, and Cognition.- Rewriting Stories and Bad Readers.- 4 -E Cognition.- Cognitive Linguistics.- Emotions.- Embodied Cognition.- Extended and Distributed Cognition.- Critical Closeness.- A Note on Methodology.- Chapter Overview.- References.- 2 Catching Feels: Fan Feelings, Bodies, and Communities.- Fan Feelings.- Conceptualizing Feels.- Metaphors We Feel By.- Conclusion: You, Me, Fandom, and Feels.- References.- 3 Living through Gifs: Embodied Cognition and Emotion.- An Embodied Understanding of Gifs.- A Feeling of Community.- The Bodies that Launched a Thousand Ships.- Conclusion: Casting Bodies.- References.- 4 Actors, Characters, and Blending.- Conceptual Blending Theory and Compression.- Bodies That Matter.- Haunting Bodies across AUs.- Conclusion: Communal Contexts.- References.- 5 Reframing Vids.- Communal Ways of Thinking.- Blending Stories.- Embodied andEmbedded Rehearsal.- Cutting Together Crossovers.- Conclusion: Performing Community.- References.- 6 Casting, Counterfactuals, and the Communal Construction of Characters.- Knowing Characters through Conceptual Blending.- Casting AU Fics.- Thinking through Stories.- Conclusion: Cognitive Flexibility.- References.- 7 Epilogue.- References.

Jessica Hautsch is an assistant professor in the Humanities Department at New York Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD from Stony Brook University, where she also taught as a lecturer with the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Her work offers a phenomenological interrogation of fan communities, exploring how the cognitive humanities, performance studies, and fandom intersect. She is an avid fan of Buffy, Game of Thrones, D&D, and emo.