Chris Pawling - 2932 Words

Introduction: Popular Fition: Ideology or Utopia? Christopher Pawling Popular Fiction and Literary criticism * Despite the growth of interest in popular fiction, it has been difficult to introduce courses on them in college and university syllabi because it is still not considered as mainstream literature, just a minor or peripheral genre. * The self-definition of English literature depends heavily on what is absent from its field- its significant other- popular literature or paraliterature whose absence from the syllabus enables us to define the dominant literary culture. Paraliterature is a sort of ‘taboo’ against which the ‘self’ of literature proper is fashioned. * Darko Suvin says that a discipline which does not take into†¦show more content†¦* Jules Verne’s story, The Mysterious Island begins with a supposedly straightforward celebration of ‘bourgeois’ science. It is subverted by Captain Nemo who epitomizes a scientific spirit of enquiry untainted by social relations. This ‘idealâ€⠄¢ image of science is finally rejected by Verne and Nemo rejected as an anachronistic figure whose illusions destroy him and his island. It helps to undermine the effect of an all-conquering science. Verne’s story does not offer a conscious interrogation of the bourgeois image of science. Macherey’s reading reveals a flaw in the narrative which allows us to gain access to the repressed meanings of ‘political unconscious’ (Frederic Jameson) of the narrative. * Martin Jordin’s analysis of 1950s novel Wolfbane shows that the narrative of Wolfbane just does not reproduce given ideological assumptions about the role of science in society but that it also puts that ideology to work ‘ testing, defining and reconstructing it in the process of interpreting the changing content of...historical experience.’ Wolfbane reverses the science fiction formula by implying that science must first be liberated from its service to an irrational social order before it can become an instrument of human progress or produce a more free and equal society. During this period, the readership of SF (the scientific middle class) had to be subordinated to the needs of the corporate economy. The text became a site of ideological struggle and not just