File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9709, message 22


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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