[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
VERSION 1.0 dtd 032900JAMES GUNNThe Academic ViewpointJames Gunn, author and professor of English at the University of Kansas, who began his writing of science fiction in 1948 and has since done some seventy stories and sixteen books while editing three more, is a master of two difficult disciplines. One is writing and the other is teaching. For over twenty years he has successfully accomplished what many a writing teacher and many a teaching writer has found impossible, the harnessing of these two highly creative occupations in one working tandem.With all this, he has found time to serve as regional chairman of the American College Public Relations Association, and on the Information Committee of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. He has also won national awards for his work as an editor and a director of public relations. He has been awarded the Byron Caldwell Smith prize in recognition of literary achievement and has also been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.He has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Science Fiction Research Association, and was presented with the Pilgrim Award of SFRA in 1976. Also, he has been given a special award by the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention for his book ALTERNATE WORLDS.He has written articles, verse, and criticism. He has done radio scripts, screen plays, and television plays. A number of his stories have been dramatized in both mediums. One, "The Immortal," was an ABC-TV "Movieof the Week" in 1969 and became an hour-long series, also titled THE IMMORTAL, in 1970. Meanwhile, his written work has been reprinted worldwide.Consequently, if there is one writer in science fiction who is fully qualified in both areas, that of the writer and that of the academic scholar of science fiction, it is James Gunn. He is a professional behind the typewriter and equally a professional in the academic area, and as such, no one is quite as qualified as he to deal with the subject of the article that follows . . . .When the dean of basketball coaches, the late Forrest C. "Phog" Allen, was asked by James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, what he intended to do with his life, Allen replied, "Coach basketball." Naismith responded, "You don't coach basketball; you just play it."For many years a similar opinion existed about science fiction: you don't teach science fiction; you just read it.As later events demonstrated, both opinions were incorrect. The first regular course in science fiction was taught at Colgate University in 1962- by Prof. Mark Hillegas, now at Southern Illinois, and Sam Moskowitz organized evening courses in science fiction at City College of New York in 1953 and 1954.Since then science fiction has spread into thousands of college classrooms and tens of thousands of high schools, and even into junior high schools and primary schools.This surprising interest of academia in science fiction has aroused suspicion and alarm among sciencefiction readers, writers, and editors. Their attitudes have been summed up by Ben Bova's editorial "Teaching Science Fiction" in Analog (June 1974) and Lester del Rey's "The Siren Song of Academe" in Galaxy (March 1975), and symbolized by Locus coeditor and co-publisher Dena Brown's comment at the 1970 organizing meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, "Let's take science fiction out of the classroom and put it back in the gutter where it belongs."Part of what frightens science fiction people about academia is the danger that it will be taught poorly, dustily, inadequately, or drably. But even if taught with knowledge, skill, and enthusiasm, science fiction may be perverted by the academic viewpoint, some of them believe.Teachers, they suspect, look at books differently from ordinary readers, and, like Medusa, their look turns things to stone. Science fiction readers point at their own high school experiences of hating Shakespeare or Dickens because they were forced to read them.Even at the college level, professors encounter the frequent student attitude: "Why do we have to analyze fiction or poetry? It ruins them."These are the concerns of the science fiction world How does academia respond?First, the notion that all science fiction teachers are alike is simply lack of knowledge about what is done in the classroom. Science fiction is taught for a variety of reasons, at all levels. In colleges, for instance, it often is taught for its content to help teach political science or psychology, anthropology, religion, future studies, or even the hard sciences. Anthologies for these specific purposes multiply in publishers' catalogs. Most objections to the teaching of science fiction, however, do not concern themselves with this use, although a bit of feeling adheres to the exploitation of science fiction for some other purpose than the one God intended.Even within English departments, teaching approaches vary. Some professors teach the ideas; some, .,' the themes; some, the history and the genre; and some, `' the great books. In general, all of these may be dismissed from the concerns of the science fiction vested interests; if any of the subjects are taught knowledgeably and capably, the judgments of their teachers about approaches ideas, themes, definitions, history, and great books need not coincide with those of any held within the science fiction world, where there is, after all, almost as great a diversity of opinion as may be found outside it.In addition to the approaches listed above, some .j teachers may include one or more science fiction books in a course in contemporary literature, popular literature, or the literature of women, or of children, or of some other area of experience. And some professors teach science fiction as if it were any other kind of literature, and apply to it the same critical concerns they apply to other books.Here, perhaps, lies the greatest possibility for a break with science fiction tradition. What values do teachers of literature search out when they teach science fiction-or, for that matter, fiction of any kind?Surprising as it may be to critics of the teaching of literature, the first consideration is story. Story is as appealing to professors as it is to lay readers. "Pleasure ` in fiction is rooted in our response to narrative movement-to story itself," Professor Robert Scholes wrote in his essay, "As the Wall Crumbles," in Nebula Ten.But story is relatively unambiguous, at least in a work of fiction in which story predominates, and teaching at all levels tends to gravitate toward those works . whose qualities teaching can enhance. This is not to say that these works are necessarily best in some abstract sense, but that they are teachable. Many persons outside academia suggest that at this point science fiction is in danger: qualities in a piece of fiction may be overvalued simply because they are less accessible.The danger is real. In some academic circles, as among a certain group of avant-garde writers, storyhas been discarded as too obvious or too easy. Susceptible students and readers have been persuaded that story is a lesser art, if it is an art at all, and difficulty, ambiguity, and obscurity are essential to good fiction. The critics of academia suggest that if these aspects of fiction are highly valued in classes, authors will be seduced into such corrupt practices.The danger is real, but it is not as great as the doomsayers fear. Authors are not as susceptible as all that (if they're not doing their own thing they aren't worth much as authors), and the teaching of literature is not as pernicious as all that. Story still counts for much in a literature class.Witness the fact that the books most frequently taught by academics (as reported by Jack Williamson in 1972) were Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Wells's The War of the Worlds, Pohl and Kombluth's The Space Merchants, Herbert's Dune, Huxley's Brave New World, Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Silverberg's Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Wells's The Time Machine, and Asimov's I, Robot. Other books among those a bit less frequently taught would reveal none unfamiliar to the average science fiction reader; the total list represents, with a few arguments, a reasonable "best" list for any knowledgeable fan, and even the arguable, titles have been honored by science fiction critics and readers.Admittedly, the list may reveal some bias toward what passes for excellence in writing, skill in characterization, or verisimilitude in description. Few teachers include "Doe" Smith or Edgar Rice Burroughs, from whose science fiction adventures a generation of readers were weaned (though I, for one, always include A Princess of Mars, and I would be surprised if some teacher somewhere does not teach The Skylark of Space or Grey Lensman).What then do science fiction teachers look for in a work of science fiction?They are concerned, of course, with teaching the art of reading and the skills of criticism (along withthe ability to communicate) rather than merely the specific work at hand. They apply principles to texts, both to make the piece of prose, poetry, or drama more accessible but also to enable students to apply similar principles to reading they may do in other classes or outside of classes. They want students to get more out of their reading, to read more alertly, more knowledgeably, more enjoyably.Critics who complain that this kind of approach to literature kills enjoyment are restricting the enjoyment of literature only to those natural readers who understand intuitively what is not immediately observable, or to those works that have no depths.What is not immediately observable to a casual reader of science fiction? The best way to answer tha...
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]