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truepennyI finished listening to Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works before we went to Tennessee for Thanksgiving--which was a saga in and of itself: we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner 12 adults, 4 children (ages 12, 10, 10, and 4), 1 three-month-old Standard Poodle, and (on the deck) 2 raccoons--and I have some observations.
1. This is not for you if you are a sf fan of long, or even recent standing. It is geared toward people who don't know anything about science fiction and maybe aren't sure they're interested. Especially in the last lectures, where he's actually talking about twentieth-century science fiction, and a person might possibly have been hoping for something chewy and thought provoking, what he gives are book reports. He explains the plots.
2. It is also not for you if you love twentieth century Anglophone fantasy (using the term here to encompass speculative fiction OTHER than science fiction), because he ignores fantasy and horror almost entirely, except for children's literature. When talking about the literature of the fantastic in the twentieth century, he eschews the Anglophone tradition and talks about Robbe-Grillet instead. The attempt to plaster some academic credibility onto science fiction is transparent, especially if--as I have--you've seen the move umpteen bazillion times before. This also applies to the roping in of Woolf (see below).
3. Of the twenty-four lectures, three focus on women--Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Ursula K. Le Guin--and he mentions maybe one or two other women writers in passing (Charlotte Perkins Gilman gets a nod, for instance). The only non-white writer mentioned is Samuel R. Delany.
4. Professor Rabkin tends to be cavalier about details. Wherein, as we all know, the devil resides.
5. I think that many of his moreinsane contentious ideas about science fiction can be explained by his wholehearted and uncritical admiration for Heinlein and vice versa. The others can be explained by his attempts to graft some respectability onto the genre by claiming it for post-modernism. In his hands, science fiction becomes the extension of the canon of Great Dead White Males (I think Delany and Gibson are the only authors he talks about who are still alive). His analyses don't mention race hardly at all, but they do talk about sex, and especially about masculinity, and I can't help hearing a coded message to other believers in the ineluctability of male superiority: Psst! Over here! You can still talk like that over here! Which isn't true, but his version of science fiction makes it sound like it is.
De Voto, Bernard. The Year of Decision: 1846. 1942. Sentry Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.
This is a tremendously ambitious and entertaining book. De Voto's project is to examine, explore, and explain what happened to America in A.D. 1846, and he does an excellent job of it, from the politicians in Washington, to the army in Mexico, the Mormons fleeing Missouri, and of course the Donner Party descending to cannibalism on the verge of California. He uses lots and lots of primary sources, has a magnificently entertaining and snarky prose style (personal to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrissa: he has no use for Bronson Alcott and does not hesitate to say so), and not only explained mid-nineteenth century American politics so that I could understand it, but convinced me to find it interesting as well. No small feat, I assure you.
The flaw in this book--and it's a big one--is its treatment of Indians. De Voto (not surprisingly for his era) persistently Others the Sioux and Cheyenne and other Plains Indians, simultaneously demonizing and infantilizing them. I object to this, of course, on the grounds that it's racist, but also because, in terms of De Voto's own project, it's a catastrophic failure. He's so carefully concerned to pay attention to what people's motives were, both the politicians and the pioneers, the Mormons and Zachary Taylor and everyone in between, but with the Indians, he doesn't even try. He essentially says, "No one knows why Indians do anything, not even the Indians themselves," and thus there's a great gaping hypocritical hole in the middle of his beautiful, elaborate, interdependent structure of motivations and causes and pure human cussedness, and it makes me very sad.
1. This is not for you if you are a sf fan of long, or even recent standing. It is geared toward people who don't know anything about science fiction and maybe aren't sure they're interested. Especially in the last lectures, where he's actually talking about twentieth-century science fiction, and a person might possibly have been hoping for something chewy and thought provoking, what he gives are book reports. He explains the plots.
2. It is also not for you if you love twentieth century Anglophone fantasy (using the term here to encompass speculative fiction OTHER than science fiction), because he ignores fantasy and horror almost entirely, except for children's literature. When talking about the literature of the fantastic in the twentieth century, he eschews the Anglophone tradition and talks about Robbe-Grillet instead. The attempt to plaster some academic credibility onto science fiction is transparent, especially if--as I have--you've seen the move umpteen bazillion times before. This also applies to the roping in of Woolf (see below).
3. Of the twenty-four lectures, three focus on women--Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Ursula K. Le Guin--and he mentions maybe one or two other women writers in passing (Charlotte Perkins Gilman gets a nod, for instance). The only non-white writer mentioned is Samuel R. Delany.
4. Professor Rabkin tends to be cavalier about details. Wherein, as we all know, the devil resides.
5. I think that many of his more
De Voto, Bernard. The Year of Decision: 1846. 1942. Sentry Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.
This is a tremendously ambitious and entertaining book. De Voto's project is to examine, explore, and explain what happened to America in A.D. 1846, and he does an excellent job of it, from the politicians in Washington, to the army in Mexico, the Mormons fleeing Missouri, and of course the Donner Party descending to cannibalism on the verge of California. He uses lots and lots of primary sources, has a magnificently entertaining and snarky prose style (personal to
mrissa: he has no use for Bronson Alcott and does not hesitate to say so), and not only explained mid-nineteenth century American politics so that I could understand it, but convinced me to find it interesting as well. No small feat, I assure you.The flaw in this book--and it's a big one--is its treatment of Indians. De Voto (not surprisingly for his era) persistently Others the Sioux and Cheyenne and other Plains Indians, simultaneously demonizing and infantilizing them. I object to this, of course, on the grounds that it's racist, but also because, in terms of De Voto's own project, it's a catastrophic failure. He's so carefully concerned to pay attention to what people's motives were, both the politicians and the pioneers, the Mormons and Zachary Taylor and everyone in between, but with the Indians, he doesn't even try. He essentially says, "No one knows why Indians do anything, not even the Indians themselves," and thus there's a great gaping hypocritical hole in the middle of his beautiful, elaborate, interdependent structure of motivations and causes and pure human cussedness, and it makes me very sad.
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Date: 2008-12-05 08:06 pm (UTC)