The matter of modes and functionalities of texts is a tricky one. There's a way in which, of course, you're right, but I know from my own experience that trying to analyze nonliterary primary sources (pamphlets about ghosts from 17th century England) was deeply frustrating with only literary-analysis tools--and not particularly successful, either. I've also found that people who read and enjoy sf&f approach what they read with a very different mindset from those who do not. One of the semesters I taught creative writing, I had the students critique a sf story of mine. Which was, admittedly, not very good (I can say with the distance of several years), but the way in which they had trouble with the story was very much about not having the right protocols for reading it. SF&F readers expect, enjoy, and want to solve puzzles in their reading (this may be one reason why the overlap between specfic readers and mystery readers is so large); people who don't read SF&F look for patterns and are only confused by puzzles. Even very small puzzles, like indicating an sfnal setting by background details rather than coming out and saying, "Long long ago in a galaxy far far away."
Every genre has its conventions, and if you don't understand and/or appreciate the conventions, you will neither understand nor appreciate the genre. And it's very hard to analyze successfully something you don't understand.
Also, all genres blur together; you can write sf with a mainstream sensibility or mainstream with an sf sensibility, and there's all sorts of excitement about the ideas of "interstitial" and "slipstream" writing in the part of the sf community that is trying for intellectual rigor and academic respectability. And obviously reading one genre does not preclude one from reading any other genre.
I keep arguing with myself about whether I think sf&f have a different "mode" from other types of literature, although I keep getting sidetracked into the question of what I think "mode" is anyway. I do think the literature of the fantastic requires learning a particular set of reading protocols, just as other genres do, and that the nature of its protocols is potentially alienating.
And there's the other hobby-horse in the back of my head, the one about how actually science fiction and fantasy aren't so much genres as settings; they have no narrative expectations coded in ... but then they do, as I was saying above, have expectations about how the reader approaches the text.
I'm making my own head hurt and am thus going to shut up.
no subject
I learnt it from
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The matter of modes and functionalities of texts is a tricky one. There's a way in which, of course, you're right, but I know from my own experience that trying to analyze nonliterary primary sources (pamphlets about ghosts from 17th century England) was deeply frustrating with only literary-analysis tools--and not particularly successful, either. I've also found that people who read and enjoy sf&f approach what they read with a very different mindset from those who do not. One of the semesters I taught creative writing, I had the students critique a sf story of mine. Which was, admittedly, not very good (I can say with the distance of several years), but the way in which they had trouble with the story was very much about not having the right protocols for reading it. SF&F readers expect, enjoy, and want to solve puzzles in their reading (this may be one reason why the overlap between specfic readers and mystery readers is so large); people who don't read SF&F look for patterns and are only confused by puzzles. Even very small puzzles, like indicating an sfnal setting by background details rather than coming out and saying, "Long long ago in a galaxy far far away."
Every genre has its conventions, and if you don't understand and/or appreciate the conventions, you will neither understand nor appreciate the genre. And it's very hard to analyze successfully something you don't understand.
Also, all genres blur together; you can write sf with a mainstream sensibility or mainstream with an sf sensibility, and there's all sorts of excitement about the ideas of "interstitial" and "slipstream" writing in the part of the sf community that is trying for intellectual rigor and academic respectability. And obviously reading one genre does not preclude one from reading any other genre.
I keep arguing with myself about whether I think sf&f have a different "mode" from other types of literature, although I keep getting sidetracked into the question of what I think "mode" is anyway. I do think the literature of the fantastic requires learning a particular set of reading protocols, just as other genres do, and that the nature of its protocols is potentially alienating.
And there's the other hobby-horse in the back of my head, the one about how actually science fiction and fantasy aren't so much genres as settings; they have no narrative expectations coded in ... but then they do, as I was saying above, have expectations about how the reader approaches the text.
I'm making my own head hurt and am thus going to shut up.