I'm waiting for the Harry Potter in Space series myself....NOT!Originally Posted by Helga
I'm waiting for the Harry Potter in Space series myself....NOT!
docendo discimus
I disagree. Literary fiction is simply "the best" fiction. It includes books from all genres - Wells for sf, Cormac McCarthy for cowboys, detective novels from Dickens, Conrad, etc.
John Carey suggests in "The Intellectuals and the Masses" that modernists produced, or stressed, writings that would (most likely) exclude the working class who were absorbing Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth, and other writers. They did this, for instance, by expecting a knowledge of Greek (or even Chinese!) in their readers, or through extreme experiments (Joyce's later works...) or a background in all the more difficult classics (Eliot's Wasteland....) or great patience with the slowest & most attenuated plots (Proust...).
Of course, the work of the modernists *might* be great literature - only appropriately trained critics can judge this - but they comprise only a specialised sub-branch of literature aimed at those with specialised knowledge and motivations. So you can't accuse literature in general of being elitist. "Treasure island" is literature and small boys of all classes can and do read that!
Note - also - dialect exists in literature. It often deviates from "received pronunciation", which genre fiction hardly ever does - it's simpler to stick to "received pronunciation", so pulp fiction flattens difference and supports the elite through distancing their readers. Working class readers of pulp don't see their dialect reflected in what they read. But they can hear their dialect in great literature. Think of Burns! His work undermines any claims to intrinsic linguistic superiority amongst the English upper crust. He's not alone. I've just read a poem of Wordsworth where he rhymes "water" with "matter", which reflects a strong Cumbrian dialect.
As a reader of classic literature and an avowed book collector,
I believe most science fiction dosn't come up to snuff with the best of the genre. I enjoy the classics of the genre which include Verne, Wells, Bradbury etc. I have finely printed and bound books of all of these writers, but most do not compare with these examples of classic science fiction, as most books in the crime genre do not compare with Conan Doyle, Poe, and on down to the moderns such as Chandler and Hammett.
I am very particular with what books I want in my library so I have only collected those which are truly literature: War of the Wrolds, The Invisible Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, Mysterious Island, Fahrenheit 451, and the Martian Chronicles have deserved space in my library. The same is true of many genre such as horror. I have fine books by Bram Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley on my shelves, but the mediocre of the horror genre, such as Anne Rice, I wouldn't want within five miles of my collection.
Last edited by dfloyd; 12-12-2009 at 01:26 PM.
I disagree with your disagreement."The best" fiction from all genres is what I would call "great fiction". (I wouldn't put Wells in that bracket by any means, or McCarthy for that matter, but that's by the by.
Literary fiction on the other hand is that specific genre which sees "literary merit" and "writerliness" as goals in and of themselves. Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Ian McEwan are examples.
The only reason I brought up dialect was because it is analagous to fiction. All dialects are equally valid expressions of a language, but a certain dialect - the Queen's English, if you will - has an artificially inflated value simply because it is associated with power and prestige.Note - also - dialect exists in literature. It often deviates from "received pronunciation", which genre fiction hardly ever does - it's simpler to stick to "received pronunciation", so pulp fiction flattens difference and supports the elite through distancing their readers. Working class readers of pulp don't see their dialect reflected in what they read. But they can hear their dialect in great literature. Think of Burns! His work undermines any claims to intrinsic linguistic superiority amongst the English upper crust. He's not alone. I've just read a poem of Wordsworth where he rhymes "water" with "matter", which reflects a strong Cumbrian dialect.
Likewise, all genres are equally valid, but a certain genre - literary fiction, or serious fiction, or whatever you want to call it - has an artificially inflated value because it is associated with an elite education.
I wasn't really talking about dialect in fiction. It's just an analogy.
Most people who have studied Wordsworth would agree with this. I have always believed that, not unlike Shakespeare also, many poets wrote in their own dialect. You can actually hear the Midland accent in Shakespeare, not unlike the strong Northern accent in Wordsworth. Other Romantic poets had interesting rhymes as well, which makes me wonder just when RP was introduced. I'm pretty sure Keats rhymes 'vase' with 'pace' & 'lace' on more than one occasion. This is not usual for most English people now, regardless of regional origin.
Sorry...I'm digressing...back to the future (sorry I mean sci fi).
docendo discimus
The thing I like about Sci-Fi, and perhaps where some of it's merits lie, are the comments and observations it has to make upon issues current to the time of writing which are then extraplated into some often distant and alien landscape and scenario.
Wells did this with The Time Machine, which is a protest against the conditions of the working class in London. As he was writing the book, he was observing the great efforts being made to construct the London Underground. From this he envisioned the evolution of the human species into upper world adapted Eloi, and the underground adapted Morlocks - the Working classes adapted into troglodyte living. I think Wells point was that there was a danger that such poor working conditions could affect social stability, plus he had socialist leanings.
In 1984, Orwell extrapolates a vision of the austere post war 40's into a dictatorship supported by the new technology that was being developed. At that time, Hitler and Mussolini had been defeated, but Mao, Stalin and Franco were still at large, and employing repressive methods and torture.
Iain M Banks novels look at a highly advanced civilisation - The Culture. The Culture helps and interferes with developing civilisations on a wide variety of planets through a special unit called First contact that places agents within those alien civilisations to steer them to a perceived desirable outcomes/ civilisational models. It has been claimed that these have parallels drawn with a technologically advanced, fairly liberal West that feels it has to interfere in the affairs of other countries.
I think these novels, and others like Brave New World ask interesting and difficult questions of society, often when telling a great story.
It is said that Doris Lessing didn’t receive the Nobel Prize in Literature until 2007 because she was considered to be a science fiction writer.
Perhaps. It's hard to get into people's heads. But she did win it eventually, didn't she? The problem as I always point out in these discussions is the fabled literati conspiracy of ivory tower professors really isn't the unified group people imagine.
There are respectable literary professors and people with Ph. D.s studying Science fiction (hundreds of them), there are universities courses given in genre fiction, there are peer-reviewed scholarly journals dedicated solely to Science Fiction.
I would agree that there are some professors who don't seem to want to give Sci-fi the time of day, but I think it's a dubious claim to simply say outright that nobody takes Sci-fi seriously. There are plenty of people, including professors that do.
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
https://consolationofreading.wordpress.com/ - my book blog!
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It's also what she claims.
I don't imagine or even believe in any fabled litarati ivory tower conspiracies anyway, you must have me confused with someone else. I just think that as a whole the term 'science fiction' has a different semiotic connotation to something like 'romanticism' or 'paradigmatic realism' or any other literary semiotic signifier.
Yes, you forgot about the sci fi degree course, reputedly the first in the world, at Birmingham Polytechnic in the 1970s. Don't forget the highly acclaimed academic work The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Peter Nicholls (First published 1979).
I stand by what I say, as a whole, the literary community doesn't take sci fi particularly that seriously as a genre. Ivory towers or no.
When did I state that nobody takes it seriously at all? Refresh my memory, feel free to quote me.
Mark Adlard
John Brossnan
John Clute
Malcolm J. Edwards
John Foyster
Jon Gustafson
Jim Harmon
Maxim Jakubowski
David Ketterer
Colin Lester
Robert Louit
Alan Myers
Frank H. Parnell
David Pringle
Peter Roberts
Takumi Shibano
Brian Stableford
Tony Sudbury
Darko Suvin
Susan Wood
Are just a few of the academics who do.
I'm not sure what your point is exactly.
Last edited by Red-Headed; 12-13-2009 at 12:03 AM.
docendo discimus
I like the 'allegorical' form of science fiction as well, but I think that it has, or can, have much more to say as a form.
Don't forget his theories on eugenics that are also promulgated in works like The Time Machine.
It is said that he turned the date 19(48) into 19(84). It is definitely a political allegory. If it wasn't set in an alternate future but in some unspecified country would it still be sci fi?
docendo discimus
Well, someone has done there homework. And you're right. I might be overstating what you said and creating a bit of a Strawmen/overgeneralization, you never did explicitly say "nobody" takes it seriously.
My point, though, is who exactly is this literary community? If you don't believe in the literati ivory tower "conspiracy" and you recognize that professors are studying Science Fiction and teaching courses on it, well, then who exactly is this literature community that doesn't take Science Fiction seriously then? Part of the problem is the literary communities are very niche, especially when we start talking about actual professors studying in universities. The Sci-fi professors are those professors interested in Science Fiction, while the guys studying Faulkner are those interested in American Modernism, while the professor studying contemporary lesbian novels are those interested in contemporary lesbian novels. The contemporary lesbian novel professor could also ask the same question, "Why aren't contemporary lesbian novels taken seriously by the literary community?"
So I guess to summarize all my posts up to this point, you might say my point is exactly your question to me: what is your point?
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
https://consolationofreading.wordpress.com/ - my book blog!
Feed the Hungry!
You can tell I've been thinking about this a bit can't you?
Yes, that is a good question, I'm sorry I was a little vague on defining who exactly the literary community is. I was thinking in a much more general way. If you claim to be studying 19th century realism, 18th century French literature or Anglo-Saxon as a rule people have a general view as to what kind of a thing that you are reading, probably something a bit 'swotty'. If, on the other hand, you claim to be studying sci fi many people imagine you sitting at home reading Batman comics or something.
Generally, most of it. I still believe that sci fi hasn't totally escaped the association with dime novels & space opera. This is unfortunate & essentially a prejudice.
I think that American Studies are relatively widely taught & it is quite a large subject inclusive of many authors & themes. I am not so sure about contemporary lesbian novels & I would have thought that it was a very small niche. One of my points is that sci fi is a vast & difficult genre to actually quantify or define. Maybe I need to do some research on contemporary lesbian science fiction novels.
Good point. My point (I think, I may be getting confused a little now) is that science fiction (& proto-sci fi) is a huge sprawling genre encompassing everything from absurdism allegory & analogy to cliches, conceptual breakthroughs, fantastic voyages, iconoclasm, linguistics, immortality, media landscapes, perceptions, predictions, satire, social comment, taboos & gender roles (including contemporary lesbians) yet most academics seem to refuse to take it seriously as a contemporary art form or genre. Maybe because of its connection with juvenilia & the corresponding associations with the cognitive estrangements of a youthful audience or readership or otherwise.
Last edited by Red-Headed; 12-13-2009 at 01:50 AM.
docendo discimus
Actually, of all the genres I think science fiction is one of the ones that is taken the most seriously - genre romance, for instance, will be studied, but not studied as "literature", more as anthropological specimens.
In that sense, I am not to sure that science fiction itself gets a bad rep. It is just that the genre has assembled a canon of texts, like some other genres, that quite simply don't hold up as "literature" outside of the significance they have within the genre. The same can be said of Fantasy literature, or Adventure stories, though fantasy would seem to get a bad reputation as the texts that do stand up are minimal, and adventure stories, as a genre seem to take a beating because of the colonial aspects that surround those texts.
As far as genre goes, I think science fiction is one of the most embraced by academics. But, in the sense of things, genre isn't as clearly cut in academic circles either - call The Left Hand of Darkness sci-fi, or whatever, the point is, it defies basic genrization.
Doris Lessing though, well I don't think she won it that late in life because of that - quite frankly, I think she won it for one particular work anyway, The Golden Notebook, which isn't sci-fi anyway. I haven't read much of her work though, so I won't comment, though one would think the fact that she ever won it to be a miracle anyway, given the difficulty.
As I stated earlier, it is earnestly studied by some academics, I don't think it is taken that seriously by many though. Darko Suvin for instance is much better known for his writing about Brecht than about science fiction.
Is this to do with the perception of it producing penny dreadfuls/dime novels by the score or space opera though? Much sci fi would stand up as literature on its own.
I suppose it depends on which 'fantasy novels'.
This is another problem with the definition of sci fi, is it prophetic, allegorical, satirical, fantastical, escapist or all or none of these?
She is convinced she was not treated with the same seriousness as many other writers of her generation because she was 'associated' with sci fi very early on. I'm inclined to agree with her.
docendo discimus
They have great value to me and I did not go through an elite, literary eduction (comprehensive school , science path...)I disagree with your disagreement.
Literary fiction on the other hand is that specific genre which sees "literary merit" and "writerliness" as goals in and of themselves. Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Ian McEwan are examples.
... literary fiction, or serious fiction, or whatever you want to call it - has an artificially inflated value because it is associated with an elite education.
Shakespeare and Dickens created literary fiction, and I don't think their value has been inflated -- given the distortion of value in modern society, quite the opposite! For instance it took me a while to get round to reading some of Shakespeare's less well known plays. The 'forces of rezentment' in modern British culture don't give them the praise they deserve. (Shakespeare gets played more in Germany than Britain -- which is shaming,...)
Literary fiction shows itself through having a high aesthetic value, that is, as providing a perceptual experience of pleasure (meaning, satisfaction, joy...) in the inner sense of the individual reader.
If a book is enjoyed only by an "elite" this might indicate that it is not actually literature, or it might indicate that only that "elite" has had the time and experience to master it -- Joyce's Ulysses/Finnegan's Wake and Proust are examples that still seem to divide the critics -- elitist foibles or literature? Discuss
"Literary fiction has literary merit" is a tautology. What is "writerliness"?
It's interesting how my own aesthetic experience can vary so much, even with supposedly great & similar works by the same author. For instance, last week I listened to Bach's Brandenburg concertos and found not much pleasure in them. The next evening I listened to his violin concertos and found them inexpressibly beautiful.
Any thoughts on how one can improve ones taste? Just keep on listening? Read books that help you know what to listen out for? If so, which books?
You can only try to find your own literary community, and hopefully leaders of that community who can help you find good things to read! Two of my favourites leaders are Charles Van Doren ("The Joy of Reading") and Harold Bloom ("The Western Canon") They recommend some science fiction books, even though they have the reputation of being stout defenders of the traditional literary canon. Kingsley Amis wrote a book about forty years ago called "New maps of Hell" that had the reputation for destroying the old fangled view that *no* science fiction can be literature. Amis seems to have worked, attacking literati for being against science fiction now seems to be a straw man attack only used by sf fans who are still living in the past (?)
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