With regards to Jana's point, I think that the reason why there are so many sub-genres is because SF is a good deal more pluralistic and aggressively inclusive than mainstream literary culture and as a result we, ironically, require more labels so as to distinguish our different tribes. As I suggested in the column, I think that definitions can have a social role, telling people what kind of tradition a work draws from as well as inviting other people to play off of them as in the case of movements. SFFH simply is not as monolithic a culture as mainstream lit. It's similar to the way that people from Boston will identify themselves as "Irish American" despite the fact that they probably have to go back 150 years to find an actual Irish person in their immediate family. If America was not as monolithic a culture as it is, these people would most likely be happy to consider themselves as Bostonians.
*
With regards to Fabio's point, I'm not as up on literary and/or semiotic theory as he clearly is but I thought that modes wereless fine-grained than genres and actually existed one meta-level up from genres. So, for example, Northrop Frye talks about the mythical and romantic modes, into which you could fit different forms of fantasy and the various kinds of mimetic that would account for the more 'literary' kinds of writing. So I'm not sure that you can just swap out genre for modes and I don't think that 'space opera' or 'steampunk' or even 'SF' behave in the way modes seem to. But I'm no literary theorist so Fabio may be talking about some other kind of mode. The other problem is that I think that the problem is the approach to categorisation is the problem and not the actual means of classifying things. For example, I can imagine "That's not high mimetic!" arguments breaking out and over-zealous editors pulling together anthologies devoted to the ironic mode and wanting tomaintain that mode's purity. I also think that my more flexible approach to classification as a lens through which to examine text rather than a way of pigeon-holing it (a method used by Farah Mendlesohn in her Rhetorics of Fantasy BTW) would also apply to modes because we could read something like Beowulf as a part of the ironic rather than mytical mode and unleash a whole new cool way of seeing it.
Comments