On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Bonnie Gray wrote:
> This is something that has always puzzled me... why "popular"
> literary forms are not considered worthy of study by some
> academics. It seems that science fiction, mystery, etc. could
> be interesting to study partly because they are "popular" forms,
> and can say a lot about current culture.
>
> Of course, I'm a scientist who hasn't been in an English class
> for over five years :) Anybody who knows about these things: what
> do you think?
>
> Bonnie
>
This is an extremely complicated issue. Part of it just has to do with
the history of English departments; literary studies have been trying to
make themselves abstruse for a while now to qualify as a separate field
worthy of funding -- i.e., to get around the "well, anybody can read
books!" argument, which wouldn't apply to something like chemistry or
nuclear physics. Part of it also has to do with changing tastes:
modernism, as Jane Tompkins points out in her book "Sensational Designs,"
defines literature as writing a) that emphasizes aesthetics over politics
-- that may reflect the outer world, but that doesn't comment on it or
suggest ways to change it -- and b) that uses language unique to the
author and not necessarily accessible to a broad audience. This
definition represents a reaction against earlier 19th-century conceptions
of literature: when Hawthorne, Melville et. al. complained about "that
damned mob of scribbling women," they were griping about people like
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote books that were designed a) to change the
world and b) to reach as broad an audience as possible. Most current
English departments are just coming out of, or still in, modernist mode;
so pop culture's becoming a source of fascination, but just recently, and
there's still some resistance to it. To the extent that SF/F is either
popular or prescriptive (utopian/dystopian/feminist whatever), it has its
share of naysayers.
Hope this makes sense . . .
Susan Palwick
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