Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Literatures of Milieux

1984; University of Missouri; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.1984.0001

1548-9930

Algis Budrys,

Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity

For most practical purposes, a literature can be described by saying its name and pointing to several examples. Its appreciators recognize it instinctively soon after their first exposure to it, and have a similarly bone-deep feeling for spurious examples. They are able to say definitely, for example, that something is not fiction, although they may be unable to explain their criteria and may face vehement disagreement from persons of equal standing in the community of appreciators. Within that community, which is quite large and proliferated, many would agree with outside observers that is a genre—that is, a literature with inherent limitations. This may be an error. A limit is definable, or it has no credibility as a limit. might be so widely extended as to enclose a field co-equal in size and capability to nongeneric literature, whatever that is. Despite many efforts over the fifty-seven years since Hugo Gernsback put Amazing Stories on the newsstands, no one has produced a definition with wide acceptance. There is room to propose, as some do, that there may be no limits, nothing that is organically and irreducibly fiction. Science fiction might perhaps be an artifact, solid enough at some core of general agreement but losing the qualities of a real thing as one moves out toward what might be its boundaries. Even within the science fiction community, there is little functional difference between and fantasy. The two supposedly discrete things are lumped together not only by booksellers and most librarians but in most private collections and conversations. And the two supposedly discrete things are often written by the same people, who appear only rarely in any other genre. Strikingly enough, no one within the community or out of it has called for a definition of fantasy. Rather, there has been an ongoing preoccupation with the often incandescent question of whether is or is not an aspect of fantasy. Such a question, of course, makes the unexamined assumption that everyone knows what fantasy is. There have been any number of confusions and frank errors attendant on these matters, and it may be useful to reexamine the assumptions on which such errors are founded. Perhaps we can at least come closer to grasping what it is we're dealing with, and what legitimate human need it fills sufficiently well to persist as an art form. To that end, we can begin with some well known attempted definitions and some history. Copyright ° 1984, Algis Budrys. AU Rights Reserved.