A thought about SF&F and Academe

[sraun]

There was a panel at Minicon some years ago - IIRC, the title was
something like "Science Fiction and Fantasy: Instantiating the
Metaphor". Someone (maybe one of the panelists?) raised an interesting
point - a number of things that are exclusively metaphorical in
mainstream fiction can easily be literal truths in SF&F. (For example,
my wife described a character as a silk-dressed cobra - the first
question asked about the passage was 'is she a snake or a human?')

Since there is that problem, the metaphors, similes, and similar
constructs in SF&F are either absent, or much larger or more
subtle. From what I can tell, this drives the academic nuts - part of
their world-view is that they provide the explanation of what the
author was saying by pointing out all these constructs, and explaining
what they mean. And in SF&F it's (mostly) just not there! The
whole story (or big blocks of it) may have meaning or illumination
outside the story proper, but it's not there at the nit-picky detail
level that academics love.

Comments

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Hm, while it's an interesting point, I don't agree with the premise as to why academics don't do their wanky exercise in delving for hidden meaning in most SF. I think it's because they simply don't care. SF (mainly) isn't marketed as "literary" (with perhaps the exception of your Atwoods - and I don't think she's a great SF writer), so academics don't think it's worth their time.

If quality SF was subjected to an in-depth analysis, I'm sure that there would be enough metaphor and whatever to keep even the wankiest academic happy. I would say, however, that SF is a little light on allusion. I think world-building can remove some of the reliance on direct cultural resonance in "literary" fiction. But I think that world-building could be worthy of academic study in its own right.

Finally, SF can be very functional in its prose - and that's nothing to do with the settings or anything like that. It's to do with mass-market authors chunking out as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. I do wish there were more SF authors with, say, Ursula Le Guin's command of language. But then again, fine prose isn't necessarily a requirement for "literary" works. Does anyone honestly believe that Wuthering Heights has fantastic writing?

Regarding how a piece of fiction is marketed and how that influences its perceived artistic merit, I think it's very similar to how visual art is marketed. If someone has a "name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst)", or went to the right art college, or had the right mentors, and they can write pseudo-intellectual wank about the "relevance" of their work, it will sell, and be appraised by the important critics. Much more beautiful (of course, that's relative), well-crafted and interesting works will be disregarded because the creator doesn't play the right games. So too with "literary" and genre fiction, IMO.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

The volume of academic journal articles and scholarly books published about Harry Potter would be sufficient to crush Voldemort if collected in one spot. There is a respected professor (or was twenty years ago) at Michigan State University who specialized entirely on comic books. I attended a panel at a national academic conference that was covering monsters in science fiction, including Alien and Star Trek DS-9. I personally know at least three English professors who publish scholarly articles on SF/F, and one is the former dean of a major state university's English department. So what on or off earth makes you think academics aren't interested in science fiction?

Sure, science fiction is a specialty area, but so is Shakespeare. You don't make a name for yourself in academic circles without publishing, and there is very little new to say about Shakespeare, but a lot new to say about science fiction, film, mysteries, and even romance. What literary academics write about has nothing at all to do with what high school English teachers teach, any more than research physicists write papers about incline planes, Newton's Three Laws, and other basics from high school physics class.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that all academics aren't interested in SF, or its their fault that it's not being taught more. I personally know a few who are myself! I should probably say that mainstream Academe doesn't appear to be. I also think that many academics who would probably be interested in further work in those areas would not be particularly encouraged in it by the Powers That Be. Publishing papers, fine; teaching, not so much, from what I can tell. I do hope that will change - after all, universities aren't just about reading Latin and Greek (with a bit of Hebrew) texts these days either.

As for Shakespeare being a "speciality" area, uh? Sure it is, at its more rarefied level. However, is there such a thing as an English 100 course that doesn't cover Shakespeare? There certainly isn't a university that doesn't offer at least one course in SS, where courses on SF and genre fiction of all kinds are comparatively rare. Or perhaps this is different in the US.

I don't know what point you were making about high school English teachers - as far as I'm aware, we weren't talking about them.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

There are, sad to say, a number of stodgy professors who think that literature ended a hundred years ago, but the number is, I hope, diminishing.

I don't know how prevalent science fiction classes are in U.S. universities in general (or non-U.S. for that matter), but most of the universities I have personal experience with have an SF class--if only one. I can't speak for anyone else, but I managed to get a B.A. in English without ever taking Shakespeare.