If I wanted to mock them, CABridges, I would have. And you'll note, I actually praised one of them.

There is nothing private about publishing your work online. The perception of publishing anything online is just that: it's published. (It's fairly standard in book contracts, for instance, that you have to assert if any of the work has appeared online in any form, as that's considered previously published.) I have no problem with art for art's sake -- you'll note I didn't go into a long dissertation on issues of plausibility, characterization, setting, etc. -- and as such I focused on craft alone. (I assure you, if these were my students, for instance, the critique would be far different.) These are award nominated stories published in a public setting, just like any literary journal or online magazine, and that I didn't hold them up for critique like I might in the LA Times Book Review or something is not simple restraint on my part but a choice to show these writers how to improve their craft. If you put your work out in the public domain, expect the public to have an opinion. Saying that it's different because it's all about community means nothing to me: I wanted to look at the writing.

I didn't take these writers out of context -- I used their context alone. Look, if I compared these writers to Richard Ford or even JK Roweling, and made assertions based on their comparative skill sets, that would be out of context. Instead, I judged them based on who they were and in comparison to each other.

I don't think every writer should want to do it professionally nor that they need to do so up to professional standards. But if they are writing 80,000 word fan fiction novels and sharing them with the entire world, it would make sense to me if they at least wanted to improve their craft some. Harry and Ron can jerk off Snape while Hermione watches for 800 pages for all I care, but I'd like to think even the average reader would enjoy writing that wasn't predicated on some of the more disorienting errors.

As for the "why" of it all -- well, it's simple: Just like you felt the need to write an ode to the CD's birthday recently in your online column, I felt the need to write about Harry Potter fan fiction on the dawn of the release of the new book as a way of looking at a topical event. And to engage Jewcy readers. And to engage myself. Pretty much the same reason I write anything. 

No, Andrew, it's a pointed knock on Lennard Davis, who for reasons unknown only to him, decided to make a sweeping statement about the French in his opening paragraph. This bit:

 "I'm sure Bayard's book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard's know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is)."

It just seemed an odd thing to say in an otherwise non-French hating essay.

I don't believe anyone has any ethical responsibility in fiction -- be it based on personal experience or not.  Vonnegut was a prisoner of war and doubtlessly suffered his own holocaust -- I think the book shows that clearly enough -- as that experience colored all of his works, even prior to Slaughterhouse and including a great many of his essays. Characters in fiction aren't precise manifestations of real life and so the issue of the ethics of the author shouldn't even come into play. People so often confuse authors with their fictional creations and ascribe real world politics on creations of the imagination. Just like Vonnegut didn't need to write about the Holocaust in his work, I don't need to make every character I create an angry, cynical, midlist Jewish author.