alecaustin, posts by tag: criticism - LiveJournal

A caveat, before we begin: Not only am I speaking in generalities, but I haven't kept a close eye on fan studies for the past few years. So this may well not be as novel or useful a perspective as I think it is.

Anyway, I've been suspicious of the claim that there's no fundamental difference between fan fiction and original fiction for a while now, in large part because many of the examples people invoke to blur that line strike me as dubious. That said, I was only recently reminded of how I articulated it to myself a while back, which is that I feel like works like Wicked and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead have a fundamentally distinct attitude towards their source material than much-- perhaps even most-- fan fiction.

Fan fiction, in general, is invested in a particularly mode of engagement with its source text. Reverence doesn't quite describe it? But there's a concern for forms of textual (or emotional) fidelity to the source material in even the most deconstructive and recombinatory works (ETA: This section here appeared to be misleading people. My argument, in a nutshell, is that most fanfic is concerned with the details of what the source material said, even if only to turn it on its head, in ways that non-fanfic isn't...), a sense that even if you took Shinji Ikari and Asuka Soryu Langley and made them the Eleventh Doctor's companions, they should still be recognizable as themselves, via some combination of reference points. If you're doing a Tough Guide pastiche, you need to hit the right tone and textual form. Etc.

How I interpret this is that in fanfic, direct discourse with the source material is important, as is shared knowledge between the author and reader. In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it matters that the protagonist isn't just some random kid-- he's Harry revised in a specific way. If you add Ensign Mary Sue to the Enterprise, it matters that it's the Enterprise, however AU everything else is. You can't or don't want to file the serial numbers off of most fanfic, because they matter: they're why readers care about the work in the first place.

When work is less engaged with one or more specific texts and more about a larger genre or sub-genre discourse, when reverence and the specifics of textual derivation and deviation cease to be important... That's when I feel works cease to function as fanfic. I can describe A Choice of Damnations as "Isildur and Boromir team up with the Nazgul to take on Morgoth/Cthulhu", but that's not actually what's going on in the book-- it's a gesture at presumed common reference points, not a marker saying that the book is a direct response to Tolkien, because it's not.

Obviously other people can and do feel differently about this topic. But in light of all this, I don't feel like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is about Hamlet in the way that most Harry Potter or Twilight fic is about the source text in question. For the much same reasons, I don't feel like Wicked is all that concerned with fidelity to Oz. To my mind introducing them into discussions of fanfic is both a bit of a red herring, and an attempt to leverage taste hierarchies to give fanfic a better reputation. (The latter isn't illegitimate, mind you-- most criticism is an attempt to skew the conversation in a way that strikes the critic as congenial-- but it's as blatant a grab for social capital as claiming Frankenstein as the first SF novel.)

Anyway. That's where I'm coming from on this one. Hopefully someone other than me will find this useful or thought-provoking.

(My internet continues to be horrid, which is why this is going up at nearly 3 am rather than any kind of civilized hour.)

I keep meaning to write this post and not getting around to it, so I am going to hack out a draft in order to prevent The Perfect from being the enemy of The Good. (The spur that got me over the hurdle of beginning was this Greg Benford guest post, which is sufficiently loaded down with unexamined appeals to taste hierarchies that I felt a full and proper demolition of it would require me to acquaint my readers with the concept in question - though awards season is a highly relevant motivator as well.)

Pierre Bourdieu introduced the sociological idea of taste hierarchies in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste - a study of the tastes of the French public, as determined by survey, published in 1984 by Harvard University Press. Taste, Bourdieu argued, is a social construct that exists within a specific cultural context, such as (in this case) that of the French class system.

The tendency of the French upper classes to (for example) prefer classical music over popular music, Bourdieu argued, was a learned social behavior, and whether deployed consciously or not, the associated taste hierarchy - wherein classical music is deemed 'better' or 'more refined' than tunes favored by the vulgar mob - reinforced class distinctions, separating the world of music-listeners into the cognoscenti and the plebes. (The plebes, of course, had their own taste hierarchy, which while not supported by social institutions like orchestras or opera halls, had both economic consequences and a real presence in society. To claim to subscribe to the upper class's taste hierarchy would be read as "putting on airs".)

One hopes that the relevance of this idea to literature, especially in the SFF vs. Mainstream discussion (as well as the endless SF vs. Fantasy conflict) is immediately clear.

Some points about taste hierarchies before we go on:

1) Taste hierarchies are not inherently bad or good. The idea that works of literature written by authors fully literate in a language, which are properly copy-edited, and are not near-copies of prior works are better than illiterate, error-ridden works of plagarism is a taste hierarchy. So is the idea that the most tedious mimetic tale of faculty adultery is superior to any science fiction novel, by virtue of its "realistic" subject matter. I think most people reading this essay would subscribe to the former hierarchy and abominate the latter.

2) The deployment and invocation of taste hierarchies is unavoidable if we want to make meaningful distinctions between works of literature. (Or movies, or games, or music, or...) Simply narrowing the field of what you're talking about invokes an implicit taste hierarchy, which is that what you are talking about is (at least momentarily) of more interest than the field of books or stories you're not talking about.

3) Taste hierarchies can be either implicit or explicit, examined or unexamined. Mostly they remain implicit and unexamined. This allows those invoking them to assert that their taste hierarchy is not a social construct they are deploying to bludgeon you into submission (or at least silence), but the one, singular Truth! Strangely, this often helps conceal the fact that they are defending their privilege, power, and/or economic position.

4) It is much better for critics and reviewers, even (or perhaps especially?) amateurs discussing which stories and books they liked from the last year, to be aware of what taste hierarchies they are applying to generate their lists of "the best" works.

Speaking of applying taste hierarchies, let's talk a bit about the hierarchies that are likely to be in play around Hugo and Nebula nominations, shall we?

The most obvious taste hierarchies within the field are those on display in the Benford post I linked to above - SF vs. Fantasy, Hard SF vs. that mushy soft stuff, Literature vs. SF (and of course, its popular converse, SF exceptionalism...), Boldness and Innovation vs. Comfort and Passivity. An observant reader will probably notice the tendency towards the unmarked, privileged, and male-identified being preferred to the marked, unprivileged, or female-identified in these oppositions, with the main exception being the attempted reversal of SF's marginal status re: mimetic literature via the (gendered) hierarchy of Boldness vs. Comfort.

There are, however, a variety of other, less obvious, taste hierarchies in play as well:

Seriousness vs. Humor: While there are exceptions, "serious" works tend to dominate humorous ones by virtue of the implication that humorous SF and Fantasy is frivolous and not addressing Important (i.e. Bold and Innovative!) topics.

"Ungendered" vs. Gendered: While the genre's core taste hierarchies and the conflicts around them can be read as gender oppositions, it's worth noting that sub-genres which are read as strongly gender-aligned haven't done terribly well in awards voting in the last few decades. This includes both romance and unalloyed military SFF, though alloying the two (Bujold's Vorkosigan books) seems to get authors past this hurdle, possibly because mixing the two allows more readers to perceive the "core genre" appeals that said books also possess.

Hip vs. Unhip: Very few SF fans were (or are) particularly hip. As such, when something in the field comes along that is perceived to have the luster of coolness, a certain portion of fandom usually latches onto it. See the New Wave, and Cyberpunk, and the New Weird. The rhetoric of literary movements nearly always invokes the Boldness vs. Comfort hierarchy, but it also positions the movement and its members as new and cool, as opposed to the (presumably) old and stodgy folks who haven't joined this decade's revolution.

Famous vs. Obscure: There's a reason people marketing books as bestsellers works, and it's because many people are willing to outsource critical thought to whether they have (or "should have") heard of someone/thing or not. (See also, nominating or voting for things one hasn't read based on the author.)

Print vs. Online: Arguably a subset of "Famous vs. Obscure", but there has historically been a lot of deference to 'The Big Three' magazines in awards nominations and voting, and I feel that said bias is worth keeping in mind.

I'm sure that my readers will be able to supply other taste hierarchies that are rarely made explicit but underly people's voting behaviors. ('Safe' novelty vs. unfamiliar/uneasy novelty is an interesting one. People think they know a lot of untrue things, and stories that challenge those false assumptions instead of playing to them often don't fare well.)

Once again, absent specifics, taste hierarchies aren't inherently good or bad. Speaking only for myself, I feel that most "humorous" SF is neither effective humor nor good SF. That said, I think very highly of Marie Brennan/swan_tower's Love, Cayce, and I expect to be nominating it for a Hugo this year. I could have gone, "Oh, right, that's not serious enough to be award-worthy," but I prefer not to leave my taste hierarchies unexamined. Humor isn't unworthy of awards: stories that fail to be funny, or that don't do other worthwhile things as well as their humor aren't. (c.f.)

As discussions about the best books of the last year and which stories should be nominated for awards continue, I ask only that we pause to consider the taste hierarchies we're invoking and supporting when we assert that a given set of works are worthy of recognition, and others are not.

Personally, I'm going to be doubling down on supporting literate, non-plagarized works that didn't bore me to tears. A partial list of which may, internet willing, be posted soon.

I recently bought and read Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw for the first time, since I wasn't aware it had been reprinted by Wesleyan (way back in 2009) until Patrick Nielsen Hayden mentioned it to me at Viable Paradise this year. Those of you who are longtime readers will know that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Delany's critical work, even when I don't agree with him, and this remains true of most of the essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. That said, I feel the initial essay, "About 5,750 Words" (written in 1968) establishes a premise upon which Delany constructs much of his critical apparatus (such as his criticism of the opening of The Dispossessed), and I feel that this premise - in light of variations in how people read and recent discoveries about human memory - is fundamentally flawed.

I'm going to skip past Delany's equation of form with content, which I feel is at least partly based on the claims he makes about reading. (The short version of that argument is that there is no separation between style and content in fiction, because the change of a single word in a novel can be "all-important".) Delany argues that:

A story is not a replacement of one set of words by another-- plot-synopsis, detailed recounting, or analysis. The story is what happens in the reader's mind as his eyes move from the first word to the second, the second to the third, and so on to the end of the tale. (Ibid., p. 4)

This might seem reasonable until you realize that Delany means it entirely literally - that he is claiming the transition from "The" to "The red" to "The red sun" is actually a meaningful and significant part of the story process:

[Words] sit in numerous inter- and overweaving relations. The process as we move our eyes from word to word is corrective and revisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before. (Ibid., p. 4)

This claim, and the micro-focused narration of Delany's 2.5 page word-by-word response to reading the sentence "The red sun is high, the blue low," followed by the bald assertion that "Though it ordinarily takes a quarter of a second, and is largely unconscious, this is the process," made me stop and gape in disbelief. Because that is not the process as I understand it, nor is such an understanding of human literacy conducive to a philosophy of writing that properly accounts for human variation and frailties.

( Collapse )

So in the course of discussing the idea of a single work as a 'masterclass' with some folks, I had some thoughts which I figured it would be worth reproducing here.

(NB: While this post was prompted by vcmw's comments at 4th Street, I don't want to come off like I'm picking on her. The intent here is to work through my ideas on how learning from example[s] works, or should work... or at minimum, how it works for me.)

Without diving into the mire of definitions, I think the first thing worth addressing is the concept of a 'masterclass'. In music, it's a class with a master composer or performer, with them performing a piece and then critiquing their students' performances. This obviously isn't what we mean when we describe a book as a 'masterclass'. What's usually meant by such a reference is that X author in Y book does Z thing so well that people should take note of it, learn from it, and emulate it - with the implication that doing so is tantamount to learning from X author directly.

As you might gather from the fact I'm writing this post, I don't think things are quite so simple. There are several reasons for this, so I'll address them one at a time.

( Collapse )

...I suspect that the stuff behind the cut may go a long way to explain why I am so incredibly judgmental about books when I feel they aren't living up to their potential. Oh well, no matter. It's not like any of you were suffering from the delusion that I was a mild-mannered young man with a kind word for everyone, right?

"The Failure mode of Clever is 'Asshole'." -John Scalzi

Apropos of sartorias's post on con programming and my previous post on critical discourse, I wanted to (briefly) talk about common ways that panels can fall apart, and then dig into why they rarely achieve a level of discourse beyond that of an undergraduate seminar.

(Also, Scalzi's point is pithy but far from universal. Often the failure mode of clever is 'boring', 'pointless', or 'wow, that was dumb'. Anyway...)

( Collapse )

( Collapse )

To put things a different way: Most bad panels out there are like bad high school class discussions. Most good panels out there are like good undergraduate seminars. I would very much like it if some good panels, especially those at cons with higher standards of discourse, could reach the level of the graduate seminars I had at MIT.

Given how capable the best people in this field are (including but in no way limited to everyone I've named above), that doesn't seem like it's too much to ask.

ETA: As noted above, these lists aren't remotely intended to be comprehensive. Feel free to suggest additional failure modes in comments!

So there's been a lot of nattering about reviews and people being demanding of authors on the nerdier end of the internets lately (and by lately I mean in the last N months, not yesterday). And I think that some important things are getting lost amidst the declarations that George R. R. Martin is not your bitch (PS: he's not, nor is any other author), and various other declarations with regards to negative reviews and YA mafias and whether it could be harmful to your career to say bad things about someone else's book in public (...potentially, but A) who cares, given the probable *magnitude* of that impact, and B) shouldn't you be more concerned about making your own book good?).

(I apologize in advance if this post is a bit of a muddle, by the way – there are a lot of complex issues here, and I doubt I'm going to be able to untangle them all short of employing the method Alexander used on the Gordian Knot.)

( Collapse )

Anyway. I hope that wasn't too incoherent, as it's all I've got for the moment.

There's a follow-up thought I have about the level of critical discourse on panels - I feel it's usually very low - and how I feel it can should be improved, but if that doesn't get written up this weekend, it may not happen for a while.

So, then. Let's talk about Fourth Street.

To start with, it was the smallest - and most reasonably sized - con I've ever been to. Everyone could conceivably have talked to everyone else at one point or another, if they'd wanted to, and the fact there was only one programming track meant that it felt like everyone was engaged in a single continuing conversation, rather than the dozen+ intertwining conversations more typical of a Wiscon or a Boskone. You also didn't have to have everyone attending all of the panels to get this effect - I missed both of the morning panels, for instance. Both the scale of the conversation (~100 people at its largest) and the quality and level of discourse (in which a certain baseline knowledge of the genre and of critical theory was assumed) felt just about right, and though of course not every thread could be followed to its conclusion, the ones that were left dangling should provide the jumping-off points for next year's discussions.

One of the great pleasure of Fourth Street, of course, was seeing mrissa and timprov and markgritter, who I hadn't seen in person in a little under 6 years. In addition to being reunited with old friends and acquaintances (I had the pleasure of being on several panels with matociquala, 2 of which she moderated), I also met a great number of interesting people, including several writers whose work I've admired for years, people I'd only known as editors, or through the internet, and people who were entirely new to me (but nonetheless proved to be great interlocutors). The fact that most of the meals that weren't at chain or hotel restaurants were excellent (the less said about the hotel's restaurant the better) only enhanced an already pleasant experience.

I was taken by surprise by both the sheer number of panels I ended up on (4 out of 10), and the positive response to my contributions on those panels. The 21st century Storytelling panel ended focusing mostly on Shadow Unit, so my contribution there were minimal, but I had a enough different people tell me that they'd enjoyed what I'd said on the other panels that I didn't feel like a total fraud for sitting up in front of a room of people with nothing but unpublished work and academic qualifications (having gone to Clarion pales a little when your fellow panelists have a list of published novels/stories as long as your arm). Hopefully Steven Brust & his co-conspirators will keep on letting me run my mouth off on panels if I can make it next year.

...and now, useful quotes, concepts and phrases:

* Victorian Party Death Syndrome!
* The Toxic Muse
* Using the children's nonfiction section as the starting point for research
* "Gene Wolfe writes books where the basic unit of construction is the trap-door." -TNH
* "The opposite of serious isn't funny. The opposite of both is 'sordid'." -R. A. Lafferty
* Works in progress as quantum waveforms

Other people undoubtedly took better notes than I did, and will have more comprehensive descriptions and lists.

Next Time: Stuff I forgot to say about how I translate ideas to stories, messages vs. themes/questions, micro- & macro-structures, good academic books on structure in screenwriting, and Chekov's bomb.