Autobiographical Writing and Fan Fiction: Pedagogical Reductions and the Hermeneutic Link

German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey noted the educational value of autobiographical writing as a means of understanding life, bound up in hermeneutic knowing: an intuitive route to understanding based on our situated human-ness, rather than on knowledge based on certainty or probability (Friesen 2020). Biographical texts can also be considered pedagogical reductions (Lewin 2017) in the way that they select important events in the life of the subject, and they simplify a life with the intention of re-presenting it for the interested reader.
In this chapter, we will come to argue that these two educational features – pedagogical reduction and hermeneutic knowing – are, of course, not exclusive to the biographical genre. Fictional novums, found in literature as characters, events, objects which have never existed in the real world (McHale 1987), allow us to safely reflect on the world-as-it-is by re-presenting a world-as-it-could-be; any interpretation of which comes to rely on hermeneutic knowing given the lack of certainty to be found in a fictional world.
In our view, fan fiction represents one such fictional novum, which is most closely linked to the genre of biographical writing. We suggest that amateur writers feel strongly linked to already established fictional characters, placing them into new situations and, via their own understanding of the world, they write about the characters’ lives, loves and experiences in a speculative way.
The argument that we will present in this chapter is based on conceptual interrogations of the central notions in this case: hermeneutic knowing, pedagogical reduction, autobiography and fan fictions. By comparing the autobiographical with the fictional, our intention is to show that both have educational merit with the use of pedagogical reduction and hermeneutic knowing. We also suggest that fan fiction – indeed, any fiction – might be considered a mediated, pedagogically reduced, form of autobiographical writing in itself.