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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2288301" data-attributes="member: 8394">Okay, but I'm not sure what this has to do with my response. You say that the moral and cultural biases of Star Wars and LotR are "mundane themes," I say no, they're good candidates for defining science fiction and fantasy in terms of something other than imagery. You say that science fiction is about identity, which I don't buy. Most good literature is about identity (or power) in one form or another, yet most good literature is not science fiction. Fantasy can just as well be about identity, and science fiction can just as well be about power. I think you'd be better off arguing that the problem of identity, for which the problem of power is one hypostasis (or vice versa), underlies both science fiction and fantasy, and that the two differ in the quality of their response to this problem.I have to disagree, not least because the Round Table, as I mentioned with reference to LotR earlier, is about white European males, monarchy and so on--the villain of Star Wars, in other words. It's also tied up with a host of Christian narratives that have no basis in Star Wars. I suppose that what I'm resistant to here is the sort of pure classification some people want out of this discussion: I don't think we're likely to find pure science fiction or pure fantasy, so while I can agree that Star Wars certainly has elements, strong elements even, of fantasy, I still see elements of science fiction as well, and I think it's a very borderline story that isn't mostly one or the other (which is perhaps one reason for its success).I doubt these would be any more translatable than Star Wars is, though I haven't read them so I couldn't say for sure.I'm suggesting that there's an enormous gap between a classical commentary on Homer and a contemporary one, sure. I don't know how much I should say about the origin of many of the criticals tools we're ingrained with in highschool (which I think Joshua is absolutely right to distrust), since most of that sort of criticism comes to us by way of Christian commentaries on problematic scriptural texts like "The Song of Songs" and troublesome classical texts like Ovid's Heroides and the Ars Amatoria, as ways of making these(often pagan) texts conform to their unique needs as Christian readers. We got a little bit into Christian angles in one of the Star Wars threads in the movies forum and a moderator said knock it off, so maybe it is better to steer clear of the historical foundations of early twentieth-century literary methodology here.I will say I don't dispute that the words "symbol" or "metaphor" have long histories--I assert that they have long and varied histories, in which time they have had very different meanings and been put to very different uses, much like the word "author." And I assert that as the practice of literary theory itself entered the modern era, these words were eroded in the classical sense you use them to the point that one could ask rhetorically "What is truth but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms?" The classical way of reading was by identity--how is this like something else? The modern way is by difference--how does this overthrow identity?Oh, I certainly think they aren't metaphors at all, or at least not in any meaningful sense. The concept of metaphor I am attacking, metaphor in the larger allegorical sense of a continuously manipulated parallel or stand-in (and not at the level of description, "her hair was white and soft like dandelions etc."), is one that has no value for me. I would be perfectly content to agree with you that fantasy is about power in this way, but then fantasy is automatically invalidated for me as something worth reading or thinking about. My angle in this thread has been one from charity; that is, I'm not particularly concerned with the popular reading of a work, or even with what its author may have intended. The question for me is: what is necessary to validate science fiction and fantasy as literature? The first part of the answer, naturally, is that we need to be able define them in some way. But the second part, which I have barely even groped toward, is that how we define them has not only to distinguish them from other legitimate narratives (even if I were to accept power and identity, these are not distinguishing features of science fiction or fantasy), but to distinguish them in a way that maintains their legitimacy as science fiction or fantasy (and not other narratives they might contain), which the imagery/setting approach does not do.Absolutely? I don't think so. It's too easy to make everything about power. There are always forces in play, but the idea of power itself is already a metaphor for force or, better yet, one of force's hypostases. I could say Star Wars is about a number of things that you might try to reduce to power--it is this reduction I resist, the reduction of all events to narrative types, of all objects to symbols, of all forces to powers or even of all acts to forces. The weakness of this approach is one of the reasons myth criticism died under its own weight even while it was poised to be the next big thing in America c.1950. This is also why I resist the very idea of genre, and even while considering it here, resist reducing something like Star Wars definitively to one genre. It's sort of like calling Anakin a whiny brat: yes, he's that...sometimes. But that isn't the whole story.</blockquote>

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