AtD and more: Fredric Jameson on SF

[ish mailian]

That it's difficult to make, sustain, articulate genre arguments is the
point. Right? The authors experiment. Experimentation is not easy. The
critic, whose job id analysis, synthesizes...also has a difficult job. She
needs to compare, contrast...describe family resemblances...the novel and
exceptional, original, watershed works....the masterpieces that may be
flawed, may be misunderstood, may be more than the author ever
imagined...what the critic exposes...

On Thursday, September 3, 2015, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Science fiction is not the only mass-cultural genre (or subgenre) whose
> relationship to ‘high literature’ and to modernism in particular presents
> problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it
> is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone *Oedipus Rex*) has any
> family relationship with the detective story. When we come to *Orlando* or
> Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments
> become more difficult to sustain, or even to articulate. Experimental
> literature ought to share generic features with its more popular cousins,
> but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same
> genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’."
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace
>
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