“Introduction: Value Added”
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
Every year in the middle of March, I fly off to Florida to take part in the gathering known as the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. The flight not only takes me from the mountainous northwest to the semitropical southeast but also from one dilemma to another. At home, I\u2019ve been trying to help students bridge the gap between their experience and knowledge and the demands of some literary text. When I arrive at the conference hotel and see the assembled writers, editors, and publishers, I\u2019m always reminded of another sort of gap\u2014the distance between producers of literature and mere consumers. For scholars and teachers are not so different from our struggling students: we too find ourselves awestruck by powerful and elegant stories and unwilling to believe that mere mortals produced them.<\/p>\n
This recognition can lead to a crisis of confidence. Who are we but a bunch of older and grayer students in an endless discussion section? How do our learned essays differ from our pupils\u2019 fumbling efforts at explication? Is our work merely parasitic, as more than a few writers have intimated (though not, thankfully, those who come regularly to the Conference)?<\/p>\n
By the time I fly home each spring, however, the crisis is over. I bring home a renewed sense of the interdependence of writer, critic, teacher, student\u2014and not just because I sometimes see the same individuals undertaking all of those roles. In the paper sessions and panels, I have acquired pieces of information that illuminate literary texts. I have been invited to make connections that even the author probably did not make consciously. I have new categories to try out, new questions to ask. And I remember that I have been learning these things all along from scholars and critics and teachers.<\/p>\n
Perhaps if there were a name for this insight I might not forget it and go through the same soul-searching every year. I hereby propose calling it a VAT\u2014not quite the VAT one encounters when traveling to Europe, but sharing the first two words. Instead of a Value Added Tax, this is a Value Added Theory.<\/p>\n
The basis of my VAT is the fact that works of literature do not really speak for themselves, nor do they remain the same thing over time, even if the words on the page have not changed. For one thing, the words are not just signs on a page\u2014they function within a living language that can add or subtract or alter meanings. For another, even though they look like solid objects, books are really actions. As acts of communication, they take their meaning from the interaction of sender, receiver, context, and code. Three of those four things change every time a book is read, and some kinds of changes make for a better experience, a more profound act.<\/p>\n
My own reading practice has been altered for the better many times. Reading Jane Tompkins\u2019s work on the sentimental nineteenth-century novel transformed Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> for me\u2014turned it from a piece of polemical claptrap into a rich and still-relevant piece of work. J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s essay \u201cOn Fairystories\u201d informs and enriches my reading of virtually every work of fantasy (even those written in opposition to Tolkien). John Cawelti\u2019s work on popular formulas has given me ways to value modes like the Western that I had previously dismissed. Value has been Added.<\/p>\n An additional bit of historical or biographical information is often enough to increase the Value of a text. A good example is the way Robert Darnton contextualizes French fairy tales in The Dead Cat Massacre<\/em>. A whole generation of scholars imbibed Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s witches\u2019 brews of literary, legal, religious, and other documents and found themselves authorized to produce new readings of Shakespeare. Sometimes the catalyzing piece of information is a powerful question: sometimes a newly recognized category, like Cyberpunk or the Cyborg. It may even be just a suggestive phrase, like Raymond Chandler\u2019s \u201cmean streets,\u201d out of which arose a whole theory of hard-boiled detective fiction. As in the case of Chandler, many of the best insights come from writers themselves when they critique themselves or others or the forms they work in. Regarding the fantastic, besides Tolkien\u2019s essay, there are invaluable pieces by Ursula K. Le Guin, E. M. Forster, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Gwyneth Jones, Joanna Russ\u2014Value Adders all. One literary work can even Add to the Value of another. Philip K. Dick is a more important writer\u2014 maybe even a better writer\u2014because of William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jonathan Lethem, and others whose work interacts with his.<\/p>\n My VAT has a number of possible applications, besides making me feel better about what I do. It might be obvious by now that I don\u2019t see the primary work of the critic as separating good literature from bad, or major from minor. Canons add nothing to one\u2019s pleasure in, or understanding of, any given text. But other things we do as students of literature (at any level) might actually contribute to the significance of a writer\u2019s work. Rather than being parasitical upon the creative community, we are part of that community, or at least in a symbiotic relationship with it.<\/p>\n Taking a cue from other art forms, interpreters of texts can Add Value as curators of literary art. Gallery owners know that the way a painting is framed and displayed can have a significant effect on its real, cash value. Anthologies and course reading lists are like museum displays; a critical article is a kind of frame. The metaphor I connect with even more strongly, though, as a semi-pro musician, is that any literary text, even the most expansive novel, is just a script or a score. Until it is performed by a reader, it is just a stack of paper. Literary scholars are like professional actors or musicians: the people whose training and talent we rely on to give us an entry into a Verdi opera or an Ibsen play. My own playing of, say, the Bach cello suites may not match up to Yo Yo Ma\u2019s, but the Value of what I do is greater because of my having been exposed to his musical intelligence, and to Janos Starker\u2019s cool clarity, and to Pablo Casals\u2019s passionate idiosyncrasy.<\/p>\n So I come home from the Conference on the Fantastic every year poorer in dollars but richer in Value Adding ideas, and I try to share the wealth with my students in turn. There are still gaps between me and the writers with whom I\u2019ve been hobnobbing, and between student and professor, but I remember that those gaps are not impassible. Sparks can cross. Gaps may even be useful, like synapses.<\/p>\n The contents of this issue illustrate several sorts of Value Added. As a record of the 29th Annual Conference on the Fantastic, it includes the luncheon talks of two of the honored guests: Vernor Vinge and Roger Luckhurst. Vinge has contributed greatly to the Value of science fictional discourse by being not only an innovative writer of fiction but also a working scientist and turner of reality-altering phrases. In addition to his own piece on the future of fantasy\u2014containing the wonderfully evocative phrase \u201cReality Remixed\u201d\u2014we have chosen to include the witty introduction by former guest of honor Joe Haldeman, which Adds its own kind of Value both to the address and to the reader\u2019s sense of the occasion. For the same reason, we lead off Roger Luckhurst\u2019s discussion of photography as science fiction with Sherryl Vint\u2019s introduction. As Vint points out, Luckhurst has long exemplified the best interaction between cultural history and genre studies, and his talk demonstrates exactly how that double perspective can redefine the world we think we see in a photograph, a text, or outside a window. Luckhurst illustrates the way frames can transform art, both by the examples he cites and by his own act of imaginative framing.<\/p>\n The third guest at the conference, Greer Gilman, was scheduled only for panels and a reading, not for a talk, but we decided to give her a virtual podium here in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/em>. In response to my request for some sort of contribution, she sent an essay that is, not surprisingly to anyone who knows her fiction, dense, elegant, erudite, funny, and elusive. Within the labyrinth she constructs, one can find many sorts of treasures with which to Add Value not only to her own work but to that of many other fantasists. Her essay is framed by an introduction from longtime friend (to Greer and to the JFA<\/em>) and scholar Faye Ringel.<\/p>\n The two other essays in this volume also come from last year\u2019s ICFA. Greg Bechtel\u2019s essay on Canadian writer Thomas King was the winner of the Graduate Student Award, but, like last year\u2019s winner, it was such a strong piece that we elected to put it through the peer review process and publish it as a regular contribution. Bechtel finds a number of innovative and rewarding ways to read King\u2019s novel by reframing it as what he calls \u201csyncretic fantasy\u201d\u2014a term that could Add Value to a number of other works. The final essay is Karen Sands-O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u201cImpertinent Miracles,\u201d a fascinating look at two very different but equally influential fantasists: Edith Nesbit and H. Rider Haggard. O\u2019Connor Adds Value to both writers and their work by tracing an unexpected link between them: the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, whose ideas made their way into Haggard\u2019s masculine romances and Nesbit\u2019s larkish adventures for children. I look forward to teaching She<\/em> and The Story of the Amulet<\/em> again to see if I can communicate the Added Value of reading them together, and both in conjunction with late nineteenth-century colonial ideas.<\/p>\n I look forward, too, to more contributions to this journal that will further enrich my experience of literature and the world. One of the corollaries to my VAT is that there is no limit to the amount of Value out there.<\/p>\n “Vernor Vinge: An Introduction” “What Future for Fantasy?” “Roger Luckhurst: An Introduction” “Contemporary Photography and the Technological Sublime, or, Can There Be a Science Fiction Photography?” “Greer Gilman: An Introduction” “Girl, Implicated: The Child in the Labyrinth in the Fantastic” “The Word for World Is Story: Syncretic Fantasy as Healing Ritual in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>” “Impertinent Miracles at the British Museum: Egyptology and Edwardian Fantasies for Young People” “A Specter Is Haunting the Humanities: Colin Davis\u2019s Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead<\/em> and Christopher Peterson\u2019s Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity<\/em>” Benjamin Szumskyj\u2019s Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays<\/em> Jason Mark Harris\u2019s Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction<\/em> C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter\u2019s Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica<\/em> Jeff Prucher\u2019s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction<\/em> Stacy Gillis\u2019s The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded<\/em> Milly Williamson\u2019s The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy<\/em> Marek Oziewicz\u2019s One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L\u2019Engle, and Orson Scott Card<\/em> Donald E. Morse\u2019s Anatomy of Science Fiction<\/em> Stephen Keane\u2019s Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe<\/em> Christine Cornea\u2019s Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality<\/em> Editor’s Introduction “Introduction: Value Added” Brian Attebery Every year in the middle of March, I fly off to Florida to take part in the gathering known as the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. The flight not only takes me from the mountainous northwest to the semitropical southeast but also from one dilemma […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":223,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-259","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/259\/revisions\/340"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h3>\n
\nJoe Haldeman<\/p>\n
\nVernor Vinge<\/p>\n
\nSherryl Vint<\/p>\n
\nRoger Luckhurst<\/p>\n
\nFaye Ringel<\/p>\n
\nGreer Gilman<\/p>\n
\nGreg Bechtel<\/p>\n
\nKaren Sands-O\u2019Connor<\/p>\nReview Essay<\/h3>\n
\nJeffrey Andrew Weinstock<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\nRev. by Gerald M. Adair<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Timothy H. Evans<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Lacy Hodges<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Rob Latham<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Graham J. Murphy<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Kelly A. O\u2019Connor-Salomon<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Amie Rose Rotruck<\/p>\n
\nRev. by W. A. Senior<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Roslyn Weaver<\/p>\n
\nRev. by D. Harlan Wilson<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"