AtD and more: Fredric Jameson on SF

[Mark Kohut]

Ok. Let me 'reduce' this rich easy review into a few bite sizes. Maybe
won't distort but you tell me.

Time travel fiction: a sub-genre only because.. Modernity. As the
unified Western-World culture was dying, we could
imagine it fragmented not only in space but time. Time travel fiction
allowed a new kind of historical fiction. The subjunctive
vision as has been said about M & D.

Hayden White, philosopher, historian mentioned by Jameson appears in
some M & D commentary. He seems to be seminal
in the philosophy of history, a kind of revisionist history, history
as perspective only, as a pre-emptive attitude towards history. (I
think he, like Pynchon, offers a new kind of grounding of 'reality'
but dunno. Reality as patterns of things from power exploitation thru
feelings of exceptionalism--saved, damned, etc.

Why does 'experimental fiction' NOT share with its SF cousins? Why are
not Margaret Atwood--and Thomas Pynchon== not examples of what he says
is not the case. Susan Sontag, a fine reader in general, dismissed
GR's full genius by saying it was ultimately just SF. She was not
alone in this belief. All ideas not full characters sums up THAT
approach, I guess.  Is he not being too narrow with his firm
definitions?

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 8:59 AM, 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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