#also its literature so i can bullshit my way through some explanations. unlike in history which is facts facta facts

[kerizaret]

I WISH YOU LUCK ON YOUR LAST EXAM!!! YOU CAN DO IT KERI I BELIEVE IN YOUUUUUU!!!

THANK YOU!!! Hopefully this one will be easier, it's just all oral exams now so it's just more stressful for me than written

But fortunately this Prof likes me 😎 and I've also done some extra work for this course as well as was active as one of. Not many ppl. So I have some bonus for that!

[hellyeahheroes]

I like this article for many things. One is the high praises it sings to Monstress

My favorite recent example of this kind of relentlessly detailed, re-centering worldbuilding is Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s comic book series Monstress. There’s no naïve narrator here. The reader is thrust into Maika Halfwolf’s complicated, danger-fraught quest—for revenge, self-knowledge, and to possibly to save her kind—without any lead up at all. If The Lord of the Rings were Monstress, the story would’ve started already in Moria. Different races, societies, magical orders, cities, and families weave together in a dense tapestry that serves its own internal logic perfectly. Monstress borrows from any and every genre—high fantasy, horror, steampunk, alternate history, magical girl manga, paranormal romance—and makes itself an entirely new thing that has to be met on its own terms. To help the reader along who is craving more “telling,” every issue includes a bonus feature, a “history lecture” of a professor cat to her kittens. Monstress rewrites the rules so completely that it isn’t until a male character shows up on the last page of issue 4 that one realizes he’s the first male to appear since the very first scene of issue 1. It doesn’t feel “strange” to have an almost completely female cast in Monstress—it doesn’t even feel like some kind of explicitly feminist literary experiment—and it doesn’t feel “political” to have diverse ethnicities and skin tones represented, because it comes across as simply the way things are in that world.

The other is deconstructing how the white cis straight male authorities have set up what is considered good writing by them to be seen as “universal” features of one when it often steems from their own privileged position (in this case being able to emphasize with other white cis straight men they do not need to have expositions to understand the cultural context of their actions)

The first literary writer I heard express open frustration with the literary establishment’s rules for literary fiction was David Foster Wallace, at a talk he gave at the Boston Public Library shortly after Infinite Jest was published. In lit fic you aren’t even supposed to use brand names, he said, because that would “date” your story to a specific time, and literary fiction is supposed to take place in a “universal” world… Which he then pointed out was still supposed to have telephones and automobiles in it (so obviously WAS dated) but not—apparently—IKEA or Coca-Cola (i.e. not THAT dated). Wallace called bullshit.

Wallace was white, male, and privileged, but he was treated as a “young whippersnapper” by the establishment who wanted to tell him what he was and was not allowed to do in his writing. He had no qualms calling out the older generation of writers who had established the rules for modern fiction under the assumption that their experience was “universal.” It wasn’t. It was only “universal” for them. The particular strain of the literary establishment Wallace pushed back against was strongly invested in this mythic ideal of universality. Why? What did they gain from this idea?

They gained the ability to write stories where they could “show” and not “tell,” that’s what. They had this ability not because they were masterful stylists of language or because they dripped with innate talent. The power to “show, not tell” stemmed from the writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that the audience would feel that those settings and stories were “universal.” (It’s the same hubris that led the white Western establishment to assume its medicine, science, and values superior to all other cultures. We’ll come back to that shortly.)

Look at the literary fiction techniques that are supposedly the hallmarks of good writing: nearly all of them rely not on what was said, but on what is left unsaid. Always come at things sideways; don’t be too direct, too pat, or too slick. Lead the reader in a direction but allow them to come to the conclusion. Ask the question but don’t state the answer too baldly. Leave things open to interpretation… but not too open, of course, or you have chaos. Make allusions and references to the works of the literary canon, the Bible, and familiar events of history to add a layer of evocation—but don’t make it too obvious or you’re copycatting. These are the do’s and don’ts of MFA programs everywhere. They rely on a shared pool of knowledge and cultural assumptions so that the words left unsaid are powerfully communicated. I am not saying this is not a worthwhile experience as reader or writer, but I am saying anointing it the pinnacle of “craft” leaves out any voice, genre, or experience that falls outside the status quo. The inverse is also true, then: writing about any experience that is “foreign” to that body of shared knowledge is too often deemed less worthy because to make it understandable to the mainstream takes a lot of explanation. Which we’ve been taught is bad writing!

Bolding mine. And I want to emphasize that last part strongly since this is what is behind a lot of rhetorics used by critics of more diverse books, comic books or movies. Claiming that they are badly written and breaking “show don’t tell” rule or “all about being a minority” when the book needs to explain where the character is coming from because the white cis straight male mainstream simply lacks knowledge necessary to get it. Or declaring character to be acting “bad” or “unlikeable” when the story concedes to these claims and does not try to provide that context they need to make character actions make sense.

Finally, there is this part that I agree wholeheartedly with

So if relentless centering of the naïve is not necessary in SF/F in order to meet the demands of literature, can we take things one step further? I would like to “decolonize” fantasy and science fiction. Literary fiction, I fear, is beyond help because of its overreliance on shared knowledge for its power. The only way to meet the literary “standard” of a “universal” story while writing about any marginalized individual—whether by culture or subculture, whether of color, queer, or even just a woman—is to make the story accessible to the educated white upper middle-class point of view. Even many of the great works of gay male literature like Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story fit squarely into this tradition, exploring the angst of discovery of one’s own homosexuality within the framework of a “great American novel” akin to The Catcher in the Rye.

But SF/F can do better. We can break the status quo and leave it broken into a completely new shape. This doesn’t reduce the potential power of an SF/F story: it increases it. Instead of a set of shared assumptions about “universal” setting, the SF/F writer has more control over every aspect of the reader experience. All fiction is metaphor, but in a story where the society, customs, and language are crafted rather than inherited, the reader experience of that metaphor can be all-encompassing. The reader learns powerful cultural norms and acquires the new language the same way they acquired their first one: through experience.

- Admin