Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder
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the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons” (88). These horizons of expectation are not exclusively literary: “the work of art is [to be] understood as a sign and carrier of meaning for a social reality, and the aesthetic is defined as a principle of mediation and a mode of organization for extra-aesthetic meanings” (108). Although Jauss assigns the impetus for the early modern reordering of the genre system to scholarly reanimation of the literature of classical antiquity, his attention to the ever-shifting horizons of expectation and the organization of extra-aesthetic meanings might just as consistently include the impact of the printing press or the changing relations of church and state in the transition from feudalism to centralized absolutist monarchies. Both contributed to the secularization of literacy, shifting it from a predominantly clerical to an increasingly aristocratic and capitalistic, financial and bureaucratic set of functions. The question might well be raised, then, of how changes in the system of genres responded to these shifting technological and social horizons of expectation.
Certainly the emergence of science fiction has often been explained as a response to the shifting horizon of technological possibility. One of the most frequently reiterated commonplaces about science fiction is that it concerns itself with the social effects of technological change and emerges in the context of industrial technological innovation, and no doubt the reason this is so frequently repeated is that it is so obviously correct. For instance, in Roger Luckhurst’s recent history of science fiction he lists as one of the conditions of the genre’s emergence “the context of a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations” in the later nineteenth century (Science Fiction, 16). But Luckhurst lists three other conditions for the emergence of science fiction that are very much to the point in the present context: “1) The extension of literacy and primary education to the majority of the population of England and America, including the working classes; 2) the displacement of the older forms of mass literature, the ‘penny dreadful’ and the ‘dime novel’, with new cheap magazine formats that force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories like detective or spy fiction as well as SF; 3) the arrival of scientific and technical institutions that provide a training for a lower-middle-class generation as scientific workers, teachers, and engineers, and that comes to confront traditional loci of cultural authority” (Science Fiction, 16). Luckhurst’s second condition corresponds directly to the subject of this book. One of the major questions being raised here is how the new magazine formats “force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories.” But there is a prior question implied in this one, the problem of what encouraged the development of these new magazine formats in the first place. The changes in the distribution of print, the speed of communication, and the technology of broadcast media that made possible mass culture were a no less momentous redistribution of literacy and its effects than those caused by the invention of the printing press itself. The question is what role the new, mass cultural genre system might have played in organizing, or managing, this redistribution of literacy.
I propose to approach this question by examining the emergence of the mass cultural genre system in relation to the one that prevailed in the set of institutions traditionally and directly charged with the social function of organizing and managing the distribution of literacy: the schools. The first and the third of Luckhurst’s conditions point to the expansion of the reading audience taking place on two levels of the educational system. Alongside the expansion of literacy at the most basic level of the ability to read, there is a more selective development in “scientific and technical institutions” of the specialized literacies required for technical and managerial tasks. Both the increasing number of people receiving primary education and the increased emphasis on technical training at the advanced level are part and parcel of “a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations” insofar as these social phenomena respond to the needs of a growing industrial economy. While the growth of the reading public would seem to be one of the preconditions for the formation of mass culture in general, Luckhurst’s emphasis on the training of technicians (“scientific workers”) and engineers points more directly to the emerging audience for science fiction. That the younger readers aspiring toward this technical-managerial literacy composed a significant part of the reading audience for early science fiction seems a reasonable guess, given the didactic ambitions and extraordinary success of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, and likewise fits well with the “Edisonades” and boy geniuses of the transition from the dime novel into the pulp magazines.2 This relation to a specialized body of generic content seems typical of mass cultural genres. Just as science fiction specializes in the subject matter of science and technology, detective fiction focuses on law and police work, the western on the settlement of the American western frontier, and romance on the social and emotional dynamics of courtship and sexuality (Attebery and Hollinger xi). The way this specificity of content fits into the larger mass cultural genre system is an issue we will need to return to later. First, however, let me return to the relation of technical training to developments in the larger educational apparatus and the academic genre system.
The development of advanced scientific and technical training takes place within an expansion of higher education through the growth of the redbrick universities in the United Kingdom and the emergence of the first great state universities in the United States. More than just opening up new venues and less exclusive opportunities to attain higher education, this growth signals a modernization of the university curriculum that includes not just scientific subjects but also a shift in literary studies away from classical antiquity toward vernacular languages and national literatures. In this context the category of “literature,” which had already developed from the designation of printed matter in general to a term that conferred upon selected texts the distinction of high quality and demanded the exercise of tasteful discernment in its use, became a kind of master genre, a boundary object that helped to rationalize curricular regularities in relation to the bureaucratic structure of the educational apparatus. What in the eighteenth century was a course of lectures in rhetoric and belles lettres would mutate into a panoply of courses on literary forms (the triad of poetry, drama, and prose supplying the overarching generic logic) and national traditions that, when entered upon a student’s transcript, promised his or her exposure to a standardized regime of study that could be measured in credit hours, billed for tuition, and used by administrators to determine the allocation of institutional resources.3
In the shift from classical to vernacular languages, the category of “literature” thus helps adapt the academic genre system to the way, in Luckhurst’s words, a “generation [of] scientific workers, teachers, and engineers … confront the traditional loci of cultural authority.” John Guillory, surveying the changing historical forms of the literary canon, writes of this nineteenth-century development that “it is only vernacular writing that has the power to bring into existence the category of ‘literature’ in the specific sense of poetry, novels, plays, and so on. The brackets that close around a particular set of genres at this time increasingly distinguish it on the one side from philosophical and scientific writing, and on the other from scripture” (76). These generic enclosures within the academy would come to complement and reinforce the separation of “literature” from the mass cultural genre system as a whole throughout most of the twentieth century.
Guillory argues that the displacement of the classics by vernacular “literature” changed the canon of texts used in advanced literary pedagogy but retained a crucial element of that pedagogy’s fundamental form, the phenomenon sociolinguists call “diglossia.” In the strict sense of the term originally formulated by the linguist Charles Ferguson, diglossia refers to a hierarchical differentiation of functions between a common, spoken language and one “which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation” (quoted in Guillory 69). Guillory stretches the concept of diglossia to include the practice of preserving and disseminating a canonical body of writing in the schools in order to inculcate an advanced linguistic competency. Thus what was formerly a linguistic distinction becomes a generic one, and the displacement of the classics by national traditions as “loci of authority” in the university curriculum institutionalizes “different practices of the same language” that help to coordinate