Themes for Week 2
Today: more on
framing SF
Thursday:
discussion of the 1924 Soviet-Russian film Aelita
(dir. Yakov Protazanov)
Watch the
(silent) film! Take the Canvas quiz on it before Thursday’s class!
Today’s plan
We’ll
discuss texts related to defining SF and then look at Suvin’s “estrangement”
and “novum” (although we should certainly touch on these in discussion). Then
we’ll look in some more detail at Suvin’s insistence on a distinction between
SF and F(antasy), and then at China Miéville’s and Ursula K. Le Guin’s (UKLG’s)
response to Suvin on this point. We’ll end with some discussion about the
(Soviet-)Russian context for SF.
Course management notes
1. Zoom chat and
raising your (virtual) hand.
2. SF
and social justice: the Slavic tradition is subversive in a different way, so
let’s explore that in this course.
Discussion period at start of class
• China Miéville,
“Cognition as Ideology”
•
Adam Roberts, “Defining SF”
•
David Seed, “Introduction”
• Darko Suvin,
“Estrangement and Cognition” (his general definition)
• Darko Suvin, “SF
and the Genological Jungle” (comparison primarily to myth)
• Darko Suvin, “SF
and the Novum” (the role of the novum)
Who
wants to contribute something from either of these texts? Please note that a
substantive contribution here will count toward your participation grade. Be
considerate of your colleagues in this respect: if you’ve made a comment in
class, give others a chance to make one, too.
Why should we care about the “Suvin event”?
1. Suvin’s
definition has “become a kind of consensus starting point, a place where we
might at least begin to speak to one
another” about SF.
2. His
definition emerges, in large part, from a study of the Slavic SF tradition, but
the approach is not limited to this tradition
only.
3. The
dialogue around Suvin’s definition has given us insight into why and how SF
texts have the affective power that they do.
Let’s continue our breakdown of
the elements in Suvin’s definition!
What,
according to Suvin, is estrangement?
It
refers to “that element in SF that we recognize as different, that ‘estranges’
us from the familiar and everyday.”
“A
representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject,
but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.”
Estrangement can be merely escapist but it can also be cognitively
creative: “We transport ourselves to the other world (estrangement) so that we can better think about this one (cognition)” (Suvin).
“We gasp not just at the strangeness but at the misplaced familiar
within it” (Miéville). One good example here is Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward.
!!! Suvin notes that estrangement is both
an artistic and also scientific strategy.
What is the “novum”?
Suvin’s novum
is the “point of difference” in a SF story.
“An
SF text may be based on one novum, such as the device that enables H. G.
Wells’s hero to travel through time in The
Time Machine (1895). More usually it will be predicated on a number of
interrelated nova, such as the varieties of futuristic technology found aboard
the starship Enterprise in Star Trek,
from faster-than-light travel to matter-transportation machines.”
It is not
necessarily about technology: cf. Butler’s Xenogenesis series.
Many nova are
derived from a stock set of SF tropes.
The novum is
cognitively validated within the narrative reality.
The
novum is symbolic, but in a special way: “SF gives us a unique version of the
symbolist approach, one where the symbol is drained of transcendental or
metaphysical aura and relocated back in the material world” (Roberts).
The
SF novum is a symbol made even more potent because in the context of the
narrative it is not a symbol at all.
We understand the novum because our everyday lives are “already
surrounded by so many instances of near-miraculous technology… that [the SF]
novum speaks directly to us” (Suvin).
Estrangement and the novum walk hand-in-hand: two examples
1. H.
G. Wells’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau”: who has read it? The novum is...
It is also the
main source of cognitive estrangement
in the text, which prompts us to…
2. UKLG’s
The Left Hand of Darkness: who has
read it? The main novum (but not the only one)
is…
This is also the main (but not the only) source of cognitive estrangement because…
3. One or two more
examples of estrangement/nova that lead to a productive cognitive return?
In terms of SF and F, Suvin insists on a separation
SF is characterized by cognitive estrangement.
While F also
estranges, it is “committed to the imposition of anti-cognitive laws.”
You
have anticipated Suvin’s take on the relationship between SF and F in your own
attempts to describe it, but should we really be so strict about it?
Many theorists and critics have
rejected Suvin’s call for a strict separation
Some have pointed
out that this would exclude from the SF megatext a lot of works that are
popularly taken to be good examples of it (e.g., Star Wars).
Note UKLG’s defense of F, which
could be equally applied to SF
“People
tell me they don’t read fantasy ‘because it’s all just made up,’ but the
material of fantasy is far more permanent, more universal, than the social
customs realism deals with. Whether a fantasy is set in the real world or an
invented one, its substance is psychic stuff, human constants, imageries we
recognize. It seems to be a fact that everybody, everywhere, even if they
haven’t met one before, recognizes a dragon.”
So perhaps we need to reevaluate Suvin here
The
critic Carl Freedman writes: “The crucial issue for generic discrimination is…
the attitude of the text itself to
the kind of estrangements being performed.”
This is the
“cognition effect,” which “has allowed generations of readers and writers to
treat, say, faster-than-light drives as science-fictional in a way that dragons
are not, despite repeated assurances from the great majority of physicists that
the former are not less impossible than the latter” (Miéville).
The cognition
effect is a kind of game played by both writer and reader.
It
is about persuasion: “Whatever tools are used for that persuasion, the effect
is a function of (textual) charismatic authority. The reader surrenders to the
cognition effect to the extent that he or she surrenders to the authority of
the text and its author function” (Miéville).
Let’s
keep these notions in mind as we explore the cultural artifacts of SF from the
Russian, Polish, and Czech traditions in this course!
Discussion period at end of class
• Suvin on the
utopian tradition of Russian SF
•
Schwartz on how Soviet-Russian SF was made
•
Banerjee’s introduction to her book We Modern
People
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