Wai Chee Class notes (3/16)

ShaynaS: Why did you choose to write about genre in your paper that we read?

Wai Chee: Analysis and outward reach, on a large and small scale. So many texts fall into so many genres, brings many popular works into conversation.

Jrlewis: You talk about biology and use scientific terms- can you compare biology and literature as like-species, and how do you group and define them?

Wai Chee: So many similarities between classifying systems in evolutionary biology and literature genres, creates connections to ancient cultures, like a backwards ancient genealogy. It helps us think about length of genealogy and and what can take place- true in biology and literature.

Anne: Where can these similarities break down? Has anyone rejected this?

Wai Chee: No imput from biologists because scientists don’t read. Literary texts are not really organisms- they’re physical objects but not organic, we must stretch the meaning of “life.” It opens up a space to talk about relations.

Jrlewis: Growth=change=life in biology. Texts like Leaves of Grass do change.

Wai Chee: There are different ways to calibrate lifespan- authors’ lives, readers, etc. With scales of time, how much extension? If something is still being added to, is that a meaningful concept of life?

Anne: What characteristics make something dead/alive? Why is that important?

sbg90: Texts take on life because they’re used by animate objects- us. They’re also related to who created them.

Wai Chee: No life but what we give to them.

Jrlewis: When you take a tool like a hammer out of its environment it is still a hammer- this is not so with organisms.

Wai Chee: No life support for a hammer out of its environment, however.

Anne: Texts wouldn’t exist without the environment of who creates/reads them.

Jrlewis: DNA is a code to be read, but it doesn’t really do anything except act like a text.

Wai Chee: Nothing goes only one way. How did the class come up with the syllabus for the remainder of the semester?

(brief class explanation)

Anne: Surprised at the number of freshmen enrolled in the course this year, also surprised at all the science majors who took the course last year. Also what interested people- we had several suggestions of sci-fi for what to read next.

Wai Chee: Dante was sci-fi- travel to another world, meets fantastical creatures.

Anne: But there is no science.

Wai Chee: Dante was actually a cutting-edge scientist for his time. Genre doesn’t only relate to text either- music too.

Anne: What was your concept of genre before this course?

ShaynaS: I knew it was a literature course coming in, so that’s what I associated the class with.

Wai Chee: One temptation is to think of identifying the “right” genre or checking the right box to classify literature. Look at a text to see why it doesn’t fit into genres- backwards can be helpful. Texts don’t have to be so fully contained.

Anne: We decided that blogs are not genres.

Wai Chee: What then?

Teal: A medium or a platform.

Wai Chee: Can you build something on blogs?

Teal: You can only build on them because they’re always being added to with comments and new posts.

Wai Chee: The idea of a platform is interesting- an invitation to other users. Novels and poems could be considered early blogs. People feel open to comment on them and criticize.

Anne: Platform vs. genre- what distinguishes them?

Teal: You can incorporate questions into blogs to spark conversation amongst people while poems make people think.

Wai Chee: Genres do have to have common features. Novels have some sort of narrative, but the goal of blogs is not to have a common thread.

Jrlewis: What about texts that parody genre and want to intentionally blurr the lines and be genre-less texts?

Wai Chee: It bends, but isn’t genre-less. You need a preexisting idea of life and genre to understand the parody- the parody is dependant on the genre that it mocks, completely dependent.

Anne: Talk more about Dante as a scientist.

Wai Chee: He was a scholar. So was Aristotle- he had a book on biology and physics. From them we learn about traditions of knowledge- they didn’t have the same limits/boundaries that we have today. And Dante was a humanist.

Anne: How would you plan a literary course on sci-fi?

Wai Chee: Start with The Devine Comedy or Inferno (more fun) and look at how humans and nonhumans interact. The Odyssey is also sci-fi: human-like creatures (Cyclops- is he human?) and tons of gods as parents. The boundaries of humans are very complex from the beginning.

Anne: So one common feature of sci-fi would be elements of nonhumans? Another interesting piece of this book is language- there isn’t a common language between all of the characters, but the issue of translation is never raised.

Wai Chee: When can we say that someone is not human? The Cyclops is “dubiously” human.

Anne: Why are there no sci-fi literary courses?

Wai Chee: Because the writing is not always good. Taught Blade Runner and got many complaints about the quality. The concepts are interesting, people just don’t have the patience for the writing.

Jrlewis: The natural science department treats writing differently- it’s the students’ job to “decode” the writing, and its their fault if they don’t understand.

Spleenfiend: That also sounds like fantasies.

Wai Chee: Are fantasies even a genre? So many different things can include fantastical elements. Sci-fi is not a good description.

Anne: A thought experiment through a fictional word- sci-fi. The ideas put pressure on the world by changing a variable. But what else can sci-fi be called?

Wai Chee: The book Man in the High Castle is a thought experiment- what if Germany and Japan had won WWII? And inside, the characters read a book about the Allies winning the war instead.

ShaynaS: What about Frankenstein as a work of sci-fi?

Wai Chee: Yes, that would be an early example.

Teal: What would you call sci-fi if not that?

Wai Chee: Counter-reality. It describes more and also includes some reality in it. But then what do we consider to be reality?

Aseidman: It’s a difficult dichotomy because reality depends on how you look at things- for example if you believe/don’t believe in love then a romance text might be reality/counter-reality for you.

Anne: History is written by the victors- there are always different versions of every story from people’s different points of view, but that isn’t counter-reality.

Wai Chee: Can some counter-reality be plausible and some implausible?

Anne: But does this now distinguish it from other genres?

Wai Chee: Human Smoke- an extension of Henry James. What would he have said if he had lived on to see WWII? He was writing before a significant historical event, but not until after the event happened did his work gain its most meaning.

Anne: Is Alice in Wonderland sci-fi?

Wai Chee: It was written by a mathematician.

Teal: It has talking animals, which could relate to the nonhuman.

ShaynaS: And the baby turns into a pig.

Aybala50: Can it be reality since it is written as a dream?

Wai Chee: A dream is a great platform.

Anne: Once a dream becomes reality, what does reality become?

Wai Chee: Dreams allow to disallow for reality, and the normal criteria doesn’t apply to dreams.

Anne: Dreams are dependant on reality and a dream is the paradox version of reality.

Wai Chee: Dreams generate a larger circumference for what authors can do.

Anne: Does this give them more or less reasonability?

ShaynaS: In dreams there is no continuation- you wake up and its over.

Anne: Should I be mad at my husband in real life if he does something that makes me angry in my dream?

Jrf: Dreams can be interpreted as telling you something about how you feel.

Anne: I hold myself responsible for my dreams- I keep a dream journal and try to figure out why what happened happened. Our dreams come form us.

Spleenfiend: Your interpretation is what gives your dreams meaning- they are random but loosely based on experiences. Our brains try to make sense of our dreams, but what about completely random ones? Focus on what you can understand.

Teal: This only considers the dreams you remember- why do you only remember these and not others? Is that significant?

Wai Chee: In literature, dreams are a literary performance.

Aybala50: Why not just fiction? If I’m real then my dreams are real to me and are important. They may represent something real- maybe the dream actually happened.

Anne: Is “real” physical actuality?

Wai Chee: No, and its not just subjective. Agreement between people does not make something reality.

Aybala50: Then what makes it real? Some people believe in God, and others don’t.

Wai Chee: And that is the classic example. Belief without proof.

ShaynaS: If everyone agrees on something, why isn’t it real?

Wai Chee: To prove something you need to not be able to counter-prove it. The fallibility constraint is not easily met, we can’t rise to that level.

Anne: If we can’t define reality by scent or fallibility, then how?

ShaynaS: Paul said that chatter makes it real.

Wai Chee: It seems like right now that what is real is what is accepted by custom, what is expected and predicted, something that has historical agreement.