On Tue, 15 Apr 1997 09:33:56 -0500 Michael Marc Levy wrote:
> Yes, the course was historically based. I used the Moon is a
Harsh
> Mistress intentionally because I wanted something to contrast with
the
> other, clearly feminist works we were using. I also discussed
Heinlein's
> odd, but very real "proto-feminism" (or whatever you want to call it).
I
> think that the bunch of students I was teaching would have hated
"Houston
> Houston" in part for the same reasons that they hated The Female
Man.
> They may have been initially impressed by the quality of Tiptree's
> writing, but, due to the ending and an unwillingness to think too
deeply
> about what they read (a glancing reference here to another thread
going on
> elsewhere on this list!), they would probably have seen the story
naively as
> nothing more as an anti-male diatribe.
>
> Mike
Heinlein isn't so much protofeminist as "first-wave" feminist (if you
accept that the first wave of modern feminism is in the late
nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries -- I know a number of
historians who woudl start muttering about the seventeenth).
Occassionally I think an anti-male diatribe is no bad thing. It might be
worth teaching Houston, Houston, next to, say, Philip K. Dick's The
Prepersons -- that might solve the "bias" accusations.
I accept some of your arguments about boredom, academic study
and depth, but it is my duty to encourage the reading to be fun. After
students came in complaining about Delany's Time Considered as A
Helix of Semi-Precious Stones this week I was very chuffed to have it
turn out to be the most productive of the three short stories we were
looking at (the other two were not sf) and students left muttering that
they must read it again.
This ties in with another point. I increasingly teach through short
stories because I mainly teach middle-ability history students, who
think well but read slowly. That way, I am less likely to bore them,
and there are some wonderful short story writers in the field.
Farah
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