On defining sf, or not: Genre theory, sf, and history

Rieder, John

doi:10.5040/9781474248655.0013

Cited by 16 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…Questions around genre and its significance have often been debated, with genre theory largely moving from formalist to historical orientations (Rieder, 2010: 191), which are not specific to chick-lit. What is important for understanding chick-lit as a type of popular fiction is the attendant associations that cohere around it as a maligned genre (see: Butler and Desai, 2008; Harzewski, 2011) despite its transnational popularity.…”

Section: Genrementioning

confidence: 99%

Pleasure as genre: popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure

Frenkel

2019

Feminist Theory

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The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its discursive properties, but popular women's fiction will also have a pattern of similarity that cuts across these forms-that similarity, I will suggest, lies in the idea of pleasure as a genre of affect that ties various popular fictions together, thereby acting as a type of imperial genre. Pleasure is so ubiquitous and so diverse across the multiple forms that constitute popular women's fiction that I argue it has become a genre in itself. This is, however, not a genre that limits itself to one particular stylistic form, but rather, as a dynamic social construct, it has become a genre of affect that invokes feelings of pleasure. Nthikeng Mohlele's most recent novel, Pleasure, exemplifies the applicability and plasticity of the concept of pleasure, allowing me to examine this work as a type of fictionalised theory which I then apply to South African chick-lit texts: the Trinity series by Fiona Snyckers and Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word by Cynthia Jele. Mohiele's expansive theorisation of pleasure is inherently local in that it is depicted at the level of experience and imagination; yet it is simultaneously macro and global in the connections made to deeply political circuits of identity-based oppressions and structural inequalities. Mohlele reveals the mobility of pleasure as a genre that offers an opportunity to think through the circuits that connect popular fiction through the lens of African literature.

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Section: Genrementioning

confidence: 99%

Pleasure as genre: popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure

Frenkel

2019

Feminist Theory

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“…Trexler and Johns-Putra (2011) maintain that while a variety of earlier novels on climate change starting in the 1960s could be considered SF, more recent CF falls into several genre categories, including thriller and literary fiction (see Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011). The contours of SF have been a focus of many debates and commentaries that are beyond the scope of this article (see, e.g., Booker & Thomas, 2009; Canavan, 2014; James & Mendelsohn, 2003; Milner, 2012; Parrinder, 2000; Rieder, 2010; Thomas, 2013). While there may be disagreement about the fiction family to which individual CF novels belong (see Atwood, 2013; Haq, 2013; Trexler, 2015; Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011), there are important connections between CF and SF that allow us to discuss the former within the SF domain.…”

Section: Climate Fiction and Science Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While there may be disagreement about the fiction family to which individual CF novels belong (see Atwood, 2013; Haq, 2013; Trexler, 2015; Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011), there are important connections between CF and SF that allow us to discuss the former within the SF domain. We start from the understanding that the boundaries of SF are “historical and mutable” (Rieder, 2010, p. 22) and “continuously reinvented” (Milner, 2012, p. 39; see also Mendelsohn, 2003). At the same time, SF has features that make it better positioned to explore the political, scientific, and cultural dimensions of climate change (Tuhus-Dubrow 2013; Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011).…”

Section: Climate Fiction and Science Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The projection of CF as a “new” genre (or subgenre of SF) may be indicative of the urgencies of the climate change issue in the last decade and a half despite CF’s longer historical trajectory. Such labeling is also reflective of the naming of SF—and, by extension, CF—as a joint enterprise among writers, readers, journalists, and marketers, suggesting that “attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception” (Rieder, 2010, p. 200).…”

Section: Climate Fiction and Science Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Climate Change Imaginaries? Examining Expectation Narratives in Cli-Fi Novels

Whiteley

Chiang

Einsiedel

2016

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

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A new generation of climate fiction called Cli-fi has emerged in the last decade, marking the strong consensus that has emerged over climate change. Science fiction’s concept of cognitive estrangement that combines a rational imperative to understand while focusing on something different from our everyday world provides one linkage between climate fiction and science fiction. Five novels representing this genre that has substantial connections with science fiction are analyzed, focusing on themes common across these books: their framing of the climate change problem, their representations of science and scientists, their portrayals of economic and environmental challenges, and their scenarios for addressing the climate challenge. The analysis is framed through Taylor’s ideas of the social imaginary and the sociology of expectations, which proposes that expectations are promissory, deterministic, and performative. The novels illustrate in varying ways the problems attending the science-society relationship, the economic imperatives that have driven the characters’ choices, and the contradictory impulses that define our connections with nature. Such representations provide a picture of the challenges that need to be understood, but scenarios that offer possibilities for change are not as fully developed. This suggests that these books may represent a given moment in the longer trajectory of climate fiction while offering the initial building blocks to reconsider our ways of living so that new expectations and imaginaries can be debated and reconceived.

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“…Historically, science fiction and fantasy has transgressed the division between the popular and the literary, often being defined less by taxonomic generic features than through the 'communities of practice' that produce and consume it: those associated with gaming, comics, online transnational popular magazines, as well as more conventionally literary texts. 35 Science fiction and fantasy might at first sight seem to have less to say about history than the realist novel, which is more tightly bound to Munslow's 'agreed facts of the past'. 36 Matt Hills, however, has argued that the way in which science fiction plays with time and creates new worlds represents a profound engagement with the process of telling history.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonialism with benefits? Singaporean peoplehood and colonial contradiction

Holden¹

2019

J. Southeast Asian stud.

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Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his notion of ethically constitutive stories that are central to individual subject formation. The role of the colonial past in such stories of Singapore is contradictory, in that the relationship between colonialism and the nation-state is seen simultaneously in terms of rupture and continuity, and this conceals a further contradiction in terms of the relationship between individual and the collective. In exploring these contradictions, and in tracing reparative possibilities for new stories of peoplehood, I will, in conclusion, turn to recent literary narratives, and in particular recent historical speculative fiction that revisions the colonial past.

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On defining sf, or not: Genre theory, sf, and history

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Pleasure as genre: popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure

Pleasure as genre: popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure

Climate Change Imaginaries? Examining Expectation Narratives in Cli-Fi Novels

Colonialism with benefits? Singaporean peoplehood and colonial contradiction

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