Aug 16, 2016 02:56 AM
Philosophical SF: Updated Master List and 30 More Recommendations
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...-list.html
EXCERPT: We might think of fictions as extended thought experiments: What might it be like if...? Ordinary fiction confines itself to hypotheticals in the ordinary run of human affairs (though sometimes momentous, exotic, or exaggerated). In contrast, speculative fiction considers remoter hypotheticals. Although much speculative fiction considers hypotheticals of future technology (and thus is science fiction), speculative fiction also includes fantasy, horror, alternative history, and utopia/dystopia. (The abbreviation "SF" can be read either as meaning science fiction specifically or speculative fiction more broadly.)
Speculative fiction is often of philosophical interest: SF writers think through some of the same hypotheticals that philosophers do -- for example about personal identity, artificial intelligence, and possible future societies. Good SF writers think through these hypotheticals with considerable insight. I would like to see more interaction between philosophers and SF writers.
[...] Since the master list is huge, I have organized it in two ways: by contributor and by author recommended. The by-contributor list consists of each list of ten works, in alphabetical order by contributor. The by-author list lists the authors (or movie directors) in order of how frequently their work was recommended. For example, the single most recommended author was Ursula K. Le Guin. The list begins with her, gathering together the Le Guin recommendations from all of the contributors. Next come Ted Chiang and Philip K. Dick, so that you can see what work of theirs has been recommended and why; then Greg Egan, then... well, I don't want to spoil your surprise....
- - - - - - - -
Forty New Philosophical SF Recommendations
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...al-sf.html
EXCERPT: Since 2014, I've been collecting professional philosophers' recommendations of personal favorite "philosophically interesting" SF -- where "SF" is meant to include not only science fiction but also "speculative fiction" more broadly construed. Each philosopher recommends ten works, along with a brief "pitch" pointing toward the philosophical interest of those works. The results as of last summer are here (41 philosophers' recommendations). Last week, I nudged some of my friends and got another seven sets of recommendations. Below are the first four. Next week, I'll post the next three (and any others that arrive in the meantime) and I'll update the overall list....
The Consolations of Strangeness (review: Jana Prikryl, The After Party)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/...rangeness/
EXCERPT: [...] Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again, and if that doesn’t do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its wheels cleaned, lubricated, and its intricate moving parts made to run again. Unlike watchmakers, poets repair their poems by leaving parts behind that after centuries of use have turned out to be unnecessary to their workings. Hard as it is to believe, lyric poets are still tinkering with a contraption thousands of years old, mending it and reinventing it with no desire to call it quits. As they do that, poetry keeps changing while remaining the same.
If that weren’t so, how could we still understand and enjoy the old Greek, Roman, and Chinese poems and recognize ourselves in them while knowing next to nothing about the world those poets lived in? Reading Jana Prikryl’s book, it crossed my mind that neither William Blake nor Emily Dickinson would have had much trouble making sense of this poem of hers [...]
[...] Jana Prikryl was born in Communist Czechoslovakia in the bleak industrial town of Ostrava, a few miles from the border of Poland. [...] They managed to slip through and eventually ended up in Canada. She received a BA from the University of Toronto and lived in Dublin before moving to New York, where she earned an MA in cultural criticism from New York University.
With so much travel in her life, it’s no wonder that the locations in her poems keep changing from country to country and that people we encounter in them often appear to be stateless. Though parents, siblings, husbands, and lovers are mentioned or alluded to, we often in fact have no idea who they are. Prikryl tells us little about them and their reasons for being where they are.
Reading some of her poems is like walking into a movie theater in the middle of a film one knows nothing about, trying to figure out what is happening on the screen, irked at first that the answer is not forthcoming, and gradually growing more and more entranced by the mystery of every face and every action, detached as they are from any context. Unlike poets who are eager to give their readers lengthy and detailed accounts of their private lives, she is discreet. She remains faithful to the ambiguity of our existence, that condition of being aware of the multiple meanings of everything we do or is done to us, and she’s wary of settling for one at the expense of the others and leaving the poetry that went along with them behind.
[...] What makes Prikryl’s poems different is the way she subverts conventions by shuffling or leaving out entirely the chronology of events, blurring identities, cutting abruptly from one scene to another without explanation, and relying on the reader’s imagination to bridge these gaps. At first this may seem like a challenge one is not prepared to undertake in a poem, but after reading her for a while one gets the hang of it. Here’s another delightful poem of hers about a man scribbling notes to a woman at a funeral and making plans to meet her afterward....
Cynthia Ozick’s Critical Mass
https://newrepublic.com/article/135781/c...tical-mass
EXCERPT: [...] For nearly four decades, Cynthia Ozick has been among the most vigorous critics in the land. Across six collections of critical nonfiction—including her latest, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays—she wields an apprehension of uncommon exactitude and style. Hers is a criticism of nourishing potency that finds equal footing with the literature it seeks to augment. Reading her you understand immediately how criticism can itself soar with art, and how the critical essay well done is its own best argument for being.
Whether by denigrating the dud term “Kafkaesque,” parsing Lionel Trilling’s noble ineptitude as a novelist, or considering how the Shoah should and should not be depicted in literature, Ozick is always affirming the role and responsibility of the critic. Leading by example, by robust doing, has rarely looked better. What’s more, her prepotent aptitude as a novelist and storywriter—she has authored eleven books of fiction—works to lend the job title “novelist-critic” some of the same prestige as “poet-critic,” its more reverberant counterpart. In this, Ozick is kin not to those critics she has helped bring into focus—Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Gershom Scholem among them—but to those critical-creative titans of twentieth century British literature: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley.
Informed by her exquisite temperament—Oscar Wilde believed that temperament was the key to any strong critic—Ozick’s essays steadfastly ask the crucial questions, not only How did a writer or book or idea come to be? but What is the literary mind? What is literature? She responds to literature in the only way that really matters: With a surging reciprocity, a consummate force and flooding of her selfhood. She advocates for no theory, no obfuscating unliterary agenda, and she has no time for those who do, the academics “destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.” Literature is pleasure—it is beauty and revelation and wisdom, or it is not literature. Criticism matters because “envisioning society whole by way of contemplation of its parts, the delicate along with the tumultuous, the weighty together with the trifling, is how a culture can learn to imagine its own face....”
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...-list.html
EXCERPT: We might think of fictions as extended thought experiments: What might it be like if...? Ordinary fiction confines itself to hypotheticals in the ordinary run of human affairs (though sometimes momentous, exotic, or exaggerated). In contrast, speculative fiction considers remoter hypotheticals. Although much speculative fiction considers hypotheticals of future technology (and thus is science fiction), speculative fiction also includes fantasy, horror, alternative history, and utopia/dystopia. (The abbreviation "SF" can be read either as meaning science fiction specifically or speculative fiction more broadly.)
Speculative fiction is often of philosophical interest: SF writers think through some of the same hypotheticals that philosophers do -- for example about personal identity, artificial intelligence, and possible future societies. Good SF writers think through these hypotheticals with considerable insight. I would like to see more interaction between philosophers and SF writers.
[...] Since the master list is huge, I have organized it in two ways: by contributor and by author recommended. The by-contributor list consists of each list of ten works, in alphabetical order by contributor. The by-author list lists the authors (or movie directors) in order of how frequently their work was recommended. For example, the single most recommended author was Ursula K. Le Guin. The list begins with her, gathering together the Le Guin recommendations from all of the contributors. Next come Ted Chiang and Philip K. Dick, so that you can see what work of theirs has been recommended and why; then Greg Egan, then... well, I don't want to spoil your surprise....
- - - - - - - -
Forty New Philosophical SF Recommendations
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...al-sf.html
EXCERPT: Since 2014, I've been collecting professional philosophers' recommendations of personal favorite "philosophically interesting" SF -- where "SF" is meant to include not only science fiction but also "speculative fiction" more broadly construed. Each philosopher recommends ten works, along with a brief "pitch" pointing toward the philosophical interest of those works. The results as of last summer are here (41 philosophers' recommendations). Last week, I nudged some of my friends and got another seven sets of recommendations. Below are the first four. Next week, I'll post the next three (and any others that arrive in the meantime) and I'll update the overall list....
The Consolations of Strangeness (review: Jana Prikryl, The After Party)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/...rangeness/
EXCERPT: [...] Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again, and if that doesn’t do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its wheels cleaned, lubricated, and its intricate moving parts made to run again. Unlike watchmakers, poets repair their poems by leaving parts behind that after centuries of use have turned out to be unnecessary to their workings. Hard as it is to believe, lyric poets are still tinkering with a contraption thousands of years old, mending it and reinventing it with no desire to call it quits. As they do that, poetry keeps changing while remaining the same.
If that weren’t so, how could we still understand and enjoy the old Greek, Roman, and Chinese poems and recognize ourselves in them while knowing next to nothing about the world those poets lived in? Reading Jana Prikryl’s book, it crossed my mind that neither William Blake nor Emily Dickinson would have had much trouble making sense of this poem of hers [...]
[...] Jana Prikryl was born in Communist Czechoslovakia in the bleak industrial town of Ostrava, a few miles from the border of Poland. [...] They managed to slip through and eventually ended up in Canada. She received a BA from the University of Toronto and lived in Dublin before moving to New York, where she earned an MA in cultural criticism from New York University.
With so much travel in her life, it’s no wonder that the locations in her poems keep changing from country to country and that people we encounter in them often appear to be stateless. Though parents, siblings, husbands, and lovers are mentioned or alluded to, we often in fact have no idea who they are. Prikryl tells us little about them and their reasons for being where they are.
Reading some of her poems is like walking into a movie theater in the middle of a film one knows nothing about, trying to figure out what is happening on the screen, irked at first that the answer is not forthcoming, and gradually growing more and more entranced by the mystery of every face and every action, detached as they are from any context. Unlike poets who are eager to give their readers lengthy and detailed accounts of their private lives, she is discreet. She remains faithful to the ambiguity of our existence, that condition of being aware of the multiple meanings of everything we do or is done to us, and she’s wary of settling for one at the expense of the others and leaving the poetry that went along with them behind.
[...] What makes Prikryl’s poems different is the way she subverts conventions by shuffling or leaving out entirely the chronology of events, blurring identities, cutting abruptly from one scene to another without explanation, and relying on the reader’s imagination to bridge these gaps. At first this may seem like a challenge one is not prepared to undertake in a poem, but after reading her for a while one gets the hang of it. Here’s another delightful poem of hers about a man scribbling notes to a woman at a funeral and making plans to meet her afterward....
Cynthia Ozick’s Critical Mass
https://newrepublic.com/article/135781/c...tical-mass
EXCERPT: [...] For nearly four decades, Cynthia Ozick has been among the most vigorous critics in the land. Across six collections of critical nonfiction—including her latest, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays—she wields an apprehension of uncommon exactitude and style. Hers is a criticism of nourishing potency that finds equal footing with the literature it seeks to augment. Reading her you understand immediately how criticism can itself soar with art, and how the critical essay well done is its own best argument for being.
Whether by denigrating the dud term “Kafkaesque,” parsing Lionel Trilling’s noble ineptitude as a novelist, or considering how the Shoah should and should not be depicted in literature, Ozick is always affirming the role and responsibility of the critic. Leading by example, by robust doing, has rarely looked better. What’s more, her prepotent aptitude as a novelist and storywriter—she has authored eleven books of fiction—works to lend the job title “novelist-critic” some of the same prestige as “poet-critic,” its more reverberant counterpart. In this, Ozick is kin not to those critics she has helped bring into focus—Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Gershom Scholem among them—but to those critical-creative titans of twentieth century British literature: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley.
Informed by her exquisite temperament—Oscar Wilde believed that temperament was the key to any strong critic—Ozick’s essays steadfastly ask the crucial questions, not only How did a writer or book or idea come to be? but What is the literary mind? What is literature? She responds to literature in the only way that really matters: With a surging reciprocity, a consummate force and flooding of her selfhood. She advocates for no theory, no obfuscating unliterary agenda, and she has no time for those who do, the academics “destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.” Literature is pleasure—it is beauty and revelation and wisdom, or it is not literature. Criticism matters because “envisioning society whole by way of contemplation of its parts, the delicate along with the tumultuous, the weighty together with the trifling, is how a culture can learn to imagine its own face....”
