Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 11:40:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu> Subject: Re: PLC: Psycho-lit On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, Christopher Elliot wrote: > And, Howard: what *does* give with your toss-away line re: sf? I'll agree > with you on the Romance side of that statement, but the best of sf (which is > a large body of work). . .? Actually, Chris, I don't regard "widening" student interest beyond a specific genre to be tossing that genre away. What may not be altogether clear from the context of a passage on what and how I teach is that I am trying to address a problem--most of my students, if they are readers at all, read only in one genre, and usually one popular genre. So I get students who like science fiction but not romance, students who read lots of romance but hate science fiction, or students who love westerns or spy thrillers, but simply dig their heels in at anything else. Many dislike stories written in previous centuries or in other lands because as readers they are so tied to content and a genre-specific formula for presenting that content. Where I can show students how many stories written in different genres employ similar narrative functions, this seems to cut them loose from their tie to a specific content and make formerly unreadable stories readable. Judging from their writing, it also changes the way they read their favorite genre. They notice a narrative logic they hadn't perceived before, and they can make connections between stories about spacepersons and stories set in apparently "realistic" contemporary settings. If I can at least make a beginning with this during the first 8 weeks of the semester, I find that students are much more receptive to stories written in other times and places, and in unfamiliar styles. We can read "Heart of Darkness" to construct a relation between 1st and 3rd world peoples, and follow this reading stories by Ellison, Bambara, and Achebe which unfold in a world still structured by the aforementioned relation. (Didn't Barthes once say something like "A little formalism takes one away from history, but a lot brings one back to it"?) While we don't really read romance stories (though sometimes I will give my students some sections of a couple of "True Romance" stories to point out the formula), we really do read science fiction and take the genre seriously. For example, in the "formalist" phase of my course I am teaching Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" with LeGuin's "The One's Who Walk Away from Omelas." And the emphasis here is on what these stories imply about the society in which they were written, what can or cannot be imagined within that society. Understanding the future as a projection of the present makes it easier for students to see the past (ie. stories written in the present about the past) as also a projection of the present. All this, in turn, makes it easier to the social "mythology" at work in "realistic" stories set in the present. This makes it easier for them to see the future and past in the present, in what is presented as natural and without history. So my point is that I am trying to move my students beyond their familiar genres--like romance, science fiction, dectective fiction--to a point where they are able to read many things and not simply for leisure or escape. This means that I am trying to open people to science fiction who normally don't like it. And I am trying to move those who read only or mostly science fiction into other genres. I am not trying to move them away from science fiction in the sense of leaving it behind for High Culture, rather I am teaching them to see the "science fiction" in other genres, including those normally considered Great Literature." And I am teaching them to see how the present is in and governs representations of the future. hh
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