Critical Theory and Science Fiction

2. Articulations

1. John Guillory, “The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks,” in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 339. 2. Articulations Genre, Theory, and Phases of Canon-Formation T he question of the canon is one of the liveliest and most hotly debated in literary studies today, and the—at best—marginal position that science fiction occupies with regard to the most widely influential canons of literary value makes explicit consideration of canon-formation urgent. It is not difficult to understand why challenges to the received canon and even critical investigations into the mechanics of canon-formation have provoked precritical ire. John Guillory, one of the most acute theorists of canonization, has pointed out that despite the social decline of aristocracy, “the canon has retained its self-image as an aristocracy of texts,” and that “the pure authority of great literature may be the only image of pure authority we have.”1 He further notes: “The canon participates centrally in the establishment of consensus as the embodiment of a collective valuation. Hence it is in the interest of canonical reformations to erase the conflictual prehistory of canon-formation or to represent such history as the narrative of error” (358). The quasi-reverence with which the canon is widely regarded in conservative and precritical literary ideologies can be further elucidated by giving Guillory’s thesis a more specifically institutional inflection. For the whole position of the humanities in the modern—especially the modern American—university cannot be understood apart from the invidious position that humanities departments occupy with relation to the much better funded and more publicly respected departments that specialize in the natural sciences. The latter owe their prestige not only to industrial and military utility but also to the image of solidity that they project, to the objective public knowledge that scientific investigation is widely supposed to attain. Literary studies can display nothing precisely comparable , because none of its more or less rigorous methods—from Germanic Articulations 25 / 2. See, for example, Guillory, “Ideology,” and perhaps a few other pieces from the same gathering ; most of Paul Lauter’s Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); chaps. 1, 2, 6, and 7 of Herbert Lindenberger’s The History in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); chaps. 4 and 5 of Richard Ohmann’s Politics of Letters (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); and Lillian Robinson’s “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 105–121. Many other titles could easily be cited, but this selection should give an adequate idea of the kind of canon theory to which I am indebted and upon which I wish to expand. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 347–348; translation modified. philology and positivistic literary history to New Criticism and even some varieties of critical theory itself—has won endorsement or respect comparable to that enjoyed by natural science. In this situation, the canon, as an “aristocracy of texts” projecting an “image of pure authority” may well seem the most solid thing that literary studies has to offer. There is a real sense, then, in which the question of the canon must be at the heart of any critical literary investigation. Much conservative ideology would forbid the question from even being asked. Nonetheless, sufficient critical energy has been directed to this matter during the recent past that not only have we witnessed a great deal of reformist tinkering with and revision of the canon, but—more important—we also possess a considerable body of work that radically problematizes canonformation itself. Writers like Guillory, Paul Lauter, Herbert Lindenberger, Richard Ohmann, and Lillian Robinson (among others)2 have investigated various ways in which canonization does not simply respond to the degree of “value” immanent in texts but rather refracts (if not necessarily reflects) a wide variety of objective interests—personal and, more especially, social—dependent upon the specificities of particular times and places. In other words, genuinely critical analysis of the canon does not simply display the “unfair” exclusion of certain texts maintained to be “great” according to the same criteria by which other texts are included. Nor does it, in a weird parody of affirmative action, lobby for the inclusion of texts in order to “represent” the various groups responsible for the production of the texts. Instead, it interrogates...