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Entry tags:
Waterlog
TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.6 mi.
TOTAL: 33.3 mi.
NOTES: Next time, cut your nails before rowing.
SHIRE-RECKONING: OMG BLACK RIDER!!! AIEEEEE!!!
In fairness to Professor Rabkin, I need to tell you all that today's lecture on Frankenstein was not only entirely unobjectionable (that's higher praise than it looks like), but also offered a very clever observation about the relationship between Frankenstein and the Gothic, particularly the Gothic expliqué à la Anne Radcliffe.
The Gothic expliqué works by what we would call (as Rabkin points out) the Scooby Doo ending. There are all kinds of strange and apparently supernatural events, but at the end, they are all revealed to be natural. What Mary Shelley does, Rabkin says, is move the ENDING of the Gothic expliqué to the BEGINNING (although he fails to note both the meta--the explanation has become part of the apparatus of the text rather than a feature of the text itself--and the fact that this preface was written by P. B. rather than M. W. Shelley): "The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." And thus we have the claim of plausibility against a background of science that Rabkin lists as one of the defining characteristics of science fiction.
And a claim of scientific plausibility is a characteristic of science fiction--not all science fiction, and to a greater or lesser extent, but it is there, and I like this observation about Radcliffe and Shelley partly because it makes that issue so very clear.
I should also note--I've been thinking about this--that probably the chief reason I am actively hostile to Professor Rabkin's ideas about fantasy (N.b., this is not the same as being hostile to Professor Rabkin himself.) is that he seems to want to elide from consideration the extensive canon of twentieth century fantastic literature in English that is neither (a.) science fiction nor (b.) for children. When he wants to talk about twentieth century fantasy, he either goes for children's literature (The Phantom Tollbooth) or South American magical realism and French post-modernism. And while I have no problem with discussing any of these genres, any more than I have a problem with an extensive discussion of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone science fiction, it really chafes my hide that he's ignoring H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, M. R. James, Russell Kirk, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, Robert W. Chambers, Hope Mirlees, Oliver Onions, Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. R. Eddison, Austin Tappan Wright, John Collier, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake . . . Bram Stoker is cited only to be dismissed, and even Tolkien is reduced to mere tokenism. (And none of the people I listed is part of the post-Tolkien commerical fantasy boom, which Rabkin does at least mention.)
Obviously, this is a choice on his part. Obviously, I disagree with it. Vehemently. And that being said, I'm going to let go of it, because there is no point in judging any intellectual endeavor on what it has chosen not to do.
DISTANCE: 3.6 mi.
TOTAL: 33.3 mi.
NOTES: Next time, cut your nails before rowing.
SHIRE-RECKONING: OMG BLACK RIDER!!! AIEEEEE!!!
In fairness to Professor Rabkin, I need to tell you all that today's lecture on Frankenstein was not only entirely unobjectionable (that's higher praise than it looks like), but also offered a very clever observation about the relationship between Frankenstein and the Gothic, particularly the Gothic expliqué à la Anne Radcliffe.
The Gothic expliqué works by what we would call (as Rabkin points out) the Scooby Doo ending. There are all kinds of strange and apparently supernatural events, but at the end, they are all revealed to be natural. What Mary Shelley does, Rabkin says, is move the ENDING of the Gothic expliqué to the BEGINNING (although he fails to note both the meta--the explanation has become part of the apparatus of the text rather than a feature of the text itself--and the fact that this preface was written by P. B. rather than M. W. Shelley): "The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." And thus we have the claim of plausibility against a background of science that Rabkin lists as one of the defining characteristics of science fiction.
And a claim of scientific plausibility is a characteristic of science fiction--not all science fiction, and to a greater or lesser extent, but it is there, and I like this observation about Radcliffe and Shelley partly because it makes that issue so very clear.
I should also note--I've been thinking about this--that probably the chief reason I am actively hostile to Professor Rabkin's ideas about fantasy (N.b., this is not the same as being hostile to Professor Rabkin himself.) is that he seems to want to elide from consideration the extensive canon of twentieth century fantastic literature in English that is neither (a.) science fiction nor (b.) for children. When he wants to talk about twentieth century fantasy, he either goes for children's literature (The Phantom Tollbooth) or South American magical realism and French post-modernism. And while I have no problem with discussing any of these genres, any more than I have a problem with an extensive discussion of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone science fiction, it really chafes my hide that he's ignoring H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, M. R. James, Russell Kirk, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, Robert W. Chambers, Hope Mirlees, Oliver Onions, Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. R. Eddison, Austin Tappan Wright, John Collier, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake . . . Bram Stoker is cited only to be dismissed, and even Tolkien is reduced to mere tokenism. (And none of the people I listed is part of the post-Tolkien commerical fantasy boom, which Rabkin does at least mention.)
Obviously, this is a choice on his part. Obviously, I disagree with it. Vehemently. And that being said, I'm going to let go of it, because there is no point in judging any intellectual endeavor on what it has chosen not to do.
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I recognize / have read exactly half those authors. The rest are going on my hunt-down-and-read list. Thanks!
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It's not an exhaustive list, either. Those are the writers I could think of in a couple minutes, without recourse to my bookshelves or other reference material. (Except I had to use Wikipedia to get John Collier's name. I could remember Fancies and Goodnights, the title of the collection of his I've read, but couldn't get any closer to Collier than Currier.) And one could debate (profitably or otherwise) whether Stanley Ellin wrote fantasy or not.
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Somebody hand that man a copy of Strategies, fast!
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