Website review: Michael Chabon, fan fiction and co...
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•1 reviews since Jun 11, 2008
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Ardashir rated 2 months ago- From the page: "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun." This infamous statement of Nazi sentiment is not limited to Fascists: many critics become combative when discussing culture. They prefer to patrol boundaries rather than venture into the no-man's-land of hybridity. In the 1950s, for example, C. P. Snow posited a hostile stand-off between the "Two Cultures" of the arts and sciences, ignoring important qualifications to his stark antithesis - including over a century's worth of science fiction since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Similarly, recent discussions of 'culture wars' and the 'clash of civilizations' have a martial tone and apparently clear parameters. On closer inspection, however, the combatants wear a variety of uniforms. If culture is often war by other means, we are finally witnessing a truce in one longstanding conflict: that between so-called elite and mass cultures. Skirmishes do continue. Like Japanese soldiers fighting the Second World War long after it ended, some still draw a cordon sanitaire around "literature" to protect it from "genre", regardless of how closely the two commingle. Jeanette Winterson proclaims "I hate science fiction", even though her recent The Stone Gods includes robots and a post-apocalyptic future. Certain critics still insist that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize primarily for The Golden Notebook (1962), even though this Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention considers her futurist "Canopus in Argus" novels "to be some of my best work". (David Langford gleefully tracks anti-genre comments at http://news.ansible.co.uk) But critics of genre are increasingly counter-balanced by prominent proponents and practitioners, including Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. The Library of America has published elegant editions of authors who only two generations ago gave libraries across America pause, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now." Hear, hear. Genre rocks and is frighteningly difficult to write well. High-brow lit on the other hand are bad stories badly told. Discuss.
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