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]

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.