This book argues that fans’ creative works form a cognitive system; fanfic, fanvids, and gifs are not simply evidence of thinking, but acts of thinking. Drawing on work in cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and psychology—particularly focused on 4-E cognition and its rejection of Cartesian dualism–this project demonstrates that cognition is an embodied, emotional, and distributed act that emerges from fans’ interactions with media texts, technological interfaces, and fan collectives. This mode of textual engagement is an approach to thinking, reading, and composing that is deeply physical, emotional, and social and is demonstrated in and enacted through fan works, like gif sets, fanvids, and fanfiction. By developing a theory of critical closeness, this project breaks new ground by proposing a methodology by which cognitive science might be fruitfully put in conversation with fan studies.weiterlesen