The first two essays in the collection of essays On Joanna Russ, edited by Farah Mendlesohn, are written by more traditional science fiction critics, Gary K. Wolfe and Edward James. Each of these text aims to focus on Russ' intense intertextual engagement with the genre, effectively arguing that Russ' work was deeply invested in the literary tradition of science fiction and fantasy writing, and didn't simply appropriate the genres for political purposes. Wolf polemically notes at the begin of his essay, "My apologies for beginning such a litany of bibliographical detail, but it's crucial to the intent of this essay, which is in part to reclaim and recognize Russ's identity as a science fiction writer--not simply a writer who used science fiction towards other ends--and to establish the extent to which Russ's work was deeply connected to the mainstream dialogue of genre SF prior to and concurrent with her most famous "breakout" works, the Nebula-winning "When It Changed" in 1972 and the now-classic The Female Man in 1975." ( Wolfe 4) Wolfe wants to break out of a number of feminist readings of Russ, that both erase the linkages that her work has with the dominant structures of the genre, as well as the tendency to read those texts instrumentally, that is to read it for its political aims, rather than engaging in the formal structures of the text. We'll return to some of the flaws contained in those assumptions, which in some sense reproduce the form/content divide, but let's begin by exploring what the essays contribute to our understanding of Russ' work. Gary Wolfe's essay, 'Alyx among the Genres' closely reads the Alyx stories for their dense engagement with 'a wide spectrum of science fiction and fantasy traditions." (Wolfe 5) Wolfe then offers a detailed analysis of the stories, showing deliberate intertextual references to Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, and others. For Wolfe, this work needs to be read not simply as prequel to the serious work of later novels, but as a serious commitment to the form and history of the genre, per se.
Edward James continues this argument through his reading of the history of Russ's review of science fiction novels, written for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between the years 1966 and 1980. James is also concerned with linking Russ to the subcultural and generic norms of the science fiction community, noting, "What can the reader of Russ's science fiction learn from a study of her reviews of science fiction novels? First, that she is in many ways a very old-fashioned reader of science fiction. That she should write in praise, in her very last review, in 1979, of “as-if speculation which produces medical and technological advances,” swhows that she is a true daughter of Gernsback and Campbell, and apparently far removed from the reaction against the Old Guard by the New Wave. She enjoys schlock; she admits the importance of entertainment; she extols the value of scientific accuracy.” (James 30) For James, Russ is a faithful science fiction traditionalist, only demanding a revision in the genre to conform to her radical feminist critiques of the genres sexism, a claim that James implicitly endorses, as well. James is certainly correct in perceiving both a love of the genre in Russ’s writing, along with a willingness to celebrate a number of generic traditions that were challenged by the New Wave. Indeed, not only Russ’s reviews show this intense interest in the history of the genre, but her writing does as well, as shown in Wolfe’s intervention. But James doesn’t take into account the generic limitations contained in the format that Russ was writing in, the book review. When one begins to read the critical essays produced by Russ in the same era, we begin to see a greater demand for formal experimentation, one that links her work to the New Wave in a manner that James attempts to deny, which both refuses to recognize a critical engagement with the New Wave with the older traditions of science fiction, and the ways that both Russ and the New Wave are engaged in a substantial formal rewriting of those traditions.
To return to the issue of form and content, brought up earlier in the essay, both Wolfe and James contribute useful material to the understanding of Joanna Russ as a science fiction author, as an author that both contributes to the generic form of science fiction, but also as an author who can only be understood through a critical engagement with that genre. However, they don't allow that Russ's engagement with the form of the genre might be driven by a feminist politic, not from an instrumental perspective, but from the perspective of a politics of form, what Darko Suvin might call a 'social formalism.' In this sense, Wolfe and James produce a mirror image of the critic who attempts to extract a political critique from the science fictional form, one that is designed to popularize and make accessible the radical feminist politics of her time. Both perspectives erase the ability for literature to produce their own theoretical structures through a formal engagement, one built on a substantial engagement with the history as well as the radical possibilities contained in the science fictional form. Russ points to radically alternative understanding of the social symbolic, one that escapes the psychoanalytical framework that dominated radical and cultural feminism. We need a social formalist approach to engage with that work.
Showing posts with label Farah Mendlesohn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Farah Mendlesohn. Show all posts
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Harry Warner Jr.'s All Our Yesterdays and the structure of fan criticism
In reading for my chapter on Judith Merril, I came across Harry Warner, Jr.'s history of fandom in the 1940's, All Our Yesterdays. The text was clearly created in response to the Sam Moskowitz's text on the same topic, The Immortal Storm. That text infamously transformed the conflicts between fan groups into an overblown melodrama, which threatened to eclipse the importance of the Second World War. In doing so, Moskowitz produced a text, clotted with purple prose that is extremely difficult to read. Moskowitz's writings are typically fairly modest collections of biographies and descriptions of texts that are fairly enjoyable to read, but his work on fandom is quite bad. Warner attempts to escape out the fevered and claustrophobic atmosphere created by Moskowitz through offering a far more modest narrative, focused on the important personae and organizations of the period, rather than its conflicts. Effectively, he creates an informally structured encyclopedia, similar to Moskowitz's collections, Seekers of Tomorrow and Explorers of the Infinite, although better written.
In the process of reading about the various collections and publications of fans, it struck me that there is a remarkable homology between the collecting practices of fans and the writing practices of early fans. At a basic level, early fans worked to accumulate collections of science fictional texts, whether in the form of magazines, books, or mimeographed fanzines. The writings of fans such as Warner and Moskowitz replicate this logic of accumulation within their writing, piling names, dates, and facts on one another. Within the context of fan writing, this makes a lot of sense, and reading this sort of material after engaging with academic texts can actually be a bit of a breath of fresh air. For the most part, fan criticism doesn't move beyond the sophistication of forming generic taxonomies. If we move from the conversation around fan writing to academic criticism these tendencies are quite troubling. The reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss and the genre criticism of Todorov amongst others have already showed the problems with reading texts in such an ahistorical manner. Clearly, expecting fan critics of the period to engage with these trends in literary criticism is both anachronistic and overly taxing. But recent academic scholarship seems to be reproducing this problematic logic, most notably the work of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. and Farah Mendlesohn.
I want to emphasize that both Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.'s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction are interesting texts, and the products of thoughtful and engaged critics. But I feel that both have a tendency to slip into the same types of eclecticism and ahistoricism found in fan writing. They implicitly critique the strong theoretical positions taken by Darko Suvin amongst others through a refusal to offer a singular definition of the genre. But neither place themselves or their narrative of the genre into a strong historical perspective, unlike Suvin, who produces a strong historical analysis of the origins of the genre, as well as the critical turn that he is a part. In ignoring these questions, the two tend to fall into the same problems originally diagnosed by Suvin. I am not invested in fully defending Darko Suvin's analysis of the genre. His polemical engagement with fantastic literature both ignores the cognitive possibilities contained with the genre (for more, read Todorov's The Fantastic) and ignores the intertwined histories of the genres. But the refusal to concretely engage with Suvin has lead to far more mystification than clarity in the criticism of the genre. I am beginning to believe that this is symptomatic of a larger problem within literary criticism, rather than one limited to science fiction studies.
In the process of reading about the various collections and publications of fans, it struck me that there is a remarkable homology between the collecting practices of fans and the writing practices of early fans. At a basic level, early fans worked to accumulate collections of science fictional texts, whether in the form of magazines, books, or mimeographed fanzines. The writings of fans such as Warner and Moskowitz replicate this logic of accumulation within their writing, piling names, dates, and facts on one another. Within the context of fan writing, this makes a lot of sense, and reading this sort of material after engaging with academic texts can actually be a bit of a breath of fresh air. For the most part, fan criticism doesn't move beyond the sophistication of forming generic taxonomies. If we move from the conversation around fan writing to academic criticism these tendencies are quite troubling. The reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss and the genre criticism of Todorov amongst others have already showed the problems with reading texts in such an ahistorical manner. Clearly, expecting fan critics of the period to engage with these trends in literary criticism is both anachronistic and overly taxing. But recent academic scholarship seems to be reproducing this problematic logic, most notably the work of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. and Farah Mendlesohn.
I want to emphasize that both Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.'s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction are interesting texts, and the products of thoughtful and engaged critics. But I feel that both have a tendency to slip into the same types of eclecticism and ahistoricism found in fan writing. They implicitly critique the strong theoretical positions taken by Darko Suvin amongst others through a refusal to offer a singular definition of the genre. But neither place themselves or their narrative of the genre into a strong historical perspective, unlike Suvin, who produces a strong historical analysis of the origins of the genre, as well as the critical turn that he is a part. In ignoring these questions, the two tend to fall into the same problems originally diagnosed by Suvin. I am not invested in fully defending Darko Suvin's analysis of the genre. His polemical engagement with fantastic literature both ignores the cognitive possibilities contained with the genre (for more, read Todorov's The Fantastic) and ignores the intertwined histories of the genres. But the refusal to concretely engage with Suvin has lead to far more mystification than clarity in the criticism of the genre. I am beginning to believe that this is symptomatic of a larger problem within literary criticism, rather than one limited to science fiction studies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)