AtD and more: Fredric Jameson on SF

[Dave Monroe]

Time Travel:
The Popular Philosophy of Narrative
David Wittenberg

ISBN: 9780823249978
Paperback
Fordham University Press


This book argues that time travel fiction is a narrative “laboratory,”
a setting for thought experiments in which essential theoretical
questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy
of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are represented in the form
of literal devices and plots.

Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and
film theory, the book links innovations in time travel fiction to
specific shifts in the popularization of science, from evolutionary
biology in the late 1800s, through relativity and quantum physics in
the mid–20th century, to more recent “multiverse” cosmologies.
Wittenberg shows how increasing awareness of new scientific models
leads to surprising innovations in the literary “time machine,” which
evolves from a “vehicle” used chiefly for sociopolitical commentary
into a psychological and narratological device capable of exploring
with great sophistication the temporal structure and significance of
subjects, viewpoints, and historical events.

The book covers work by well-known time travel writers such as H. G.
Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan
Ellison, as well as pulp fiction writers of the 1920s through the
1940s, popular and avant-garde postwar science fiction, television
shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” and
current cinema. Literature, film, and TV are read alongside
theoretical work ranging from Einstein, Schrödinger, and Stephen
Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg
argues that even the most mainstream audiences of popular time travel
fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with many of the same
questions about temporality, identity, and history that concern
literary theorists, media and film scholars, and philosophers.

http://fordhampress.com/index.php/time-trave-paperback.html

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 7:59 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l