Mar 18 2024
This month we read the book with the best title in SF studies, Seo-Young Chu's Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010), which was also formative in both of our trajectories in SF studies. We discuss Chu's approach to science fictional language as lyricism, the absence (or omnipresence?) of science fictional poetry, and consider how she recasts Suvin's core ideas into a totally new form. For Chu, science fiction isn't just a genre but a quality of language itself at a deep level, and so this episode is an extensive delve into not only her examples but the implications of her theory, how time travel is a trauma plot, whether cyberspace is real, how symptomatic reading works, and whether telepathy is chiasmus. We also get some extremely lush close reading. This isn't cognitive estrangement - it's estranged cognition.
Topics: Poetry, cognitive estrangement, estranged cognition, close reading, mimesis
Next month we'll be reading Cameron Kunzelman's The World is Born From Zero and make a first dip into talking about video games.