1. So I have a few thoughts on H.G. Wells, Henry James, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, National Review & how sci-fi & fantasy became the lingua franca of political discourse.https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1135636580629143553 …
1. Writer, The Nation https://www.thenation.com/authors/jeet-heer/ … 2. email: jeetheer1967 at gmail dot com 3. Twitter essayist 4. Drawn by Joe Ollmann
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Jeet Heer Retweeted Matthew Zeitlin
1. So I have a few thoughts on H.G. Wells, Henry James, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, National Review & how sci-fi & fantasy became the lingua franca of political discourse.https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1135636580629143553 …
Jeet Heer added,
2. H.G. Wells & Henry James were friends once, even talked about collaborating on a novel about a voyage to Mars, but feuded. Their personal rift was emblematic of a larger split between genre & literary fiction.
3. The Wells/James rift was complicated but based on the two men deciding they didn't like each others approach to fiction: James seeing Wells as slapdash plotmonger & Wells concluding James was a effete wanker.
4. With the Wells/James beak-up, we see "literary" fiction (bourgeois, private, mimetic, committed to recording impressionistic shades of feeling) divorcing from fantastika or genre (populist, public, anti-mimetic, committed to narrative drive)
5. Of the two sides of the mimetic/fantastika it is obviously fantastika that is better equipped to deal with politics. Modern fantastika (encompassing the gothic, horror, fantasy & science fiction) was born out of the need to register the world crisis of the French Revolution.
6. While fantastika (Mary Shelley, Verne,Wells etc.) was trying to register the public of world of promethean technology, class war, revolution & imperialism, the bourgy mimetic novel was pointedly anti-political: a retreat into the private world of sensibility.
7. So it's been true from Frankenstein to Game of Thrones that it's fantastika that has consistently provided us with the language for talking about public life: Think of 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Star Wars, Harry Potter.
It's an offshoot of fantastika later absorbed by genre s.f. -- see Jameson's Archeologies of the Future.
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