The Archontic Text

Summary
Archontic text is a term coined by Abigail Derecho, borrowing from Derrida's Archive Fever, to describe work that is referential of other work. This term covers both retellings such as The Wide Sargasso Sea, and also fanfiction.

The term archontic literature describes work that it behaves like an archive as Derrida defines it. That is, that it is always open to new entries, that each entry changes the whole, and that it is self-generative.

An archive always seeks to make more of itself. Although all texts display intertextuality and can arguably be seen to belong to the archive of all texts that influenced its author and came before it, Derecho narrows the scope of her proposed definition to works that are directly referential.

Although Derecho is interested specifically in fanfiction, her discussion and definition of archontic literature applies equally to transmedia storytelling as a whole. Transmedia stories, like archontic literature, are always open to new entries, and each entry changes the nature of the whole, and the participatory nature of the audience ensures that the storyworld is self-generating, constantly producing more of itself as readers use the existing archive as source material to create new user generated content that will belong to the archive as well.

The wiki part of this project serves as the most direct example of such an archive, and this is where it derives its name. Using the Archontic Wiki, users can freely comment on or edit existing pages and interpretations, or add more work of their own and link it into the Archonitc project.

A similar concept was described by Oulipean writer Italo Calvino, which he called a literary machine. He said, roughly, that a true literary machine produces more disorder from its order.