Chris Olson - SunPS wrote: >I wrote: > > >>I direct the list's attention to question >>#4, if nowhere else (though I found #3 >>very interesting). >> >> > >Dang, I should really type slower. I meant >#2, not #3. My bad. I shall peel off my toenails >with pliers in penitence. > > > Interesting interview. Having started out as one of those academic critics, at least in embroyonic form, I feel I can speak to some of what he is saying, but I'd say he missed a bet. There's actually a second bifurcation on the critical side between academic literary studies & public reviewers and critics; often the two have little in common, and there are many more academics than reviewers. It's true that SF doesn't get studied as often proportionally as traditional fiction (& perhaps not as often as its readers & adherents feel is justified). OTOH, when I taught my first class in the spring of '76, the course chairman selected =The Left Hand of Darkness= for us. He was a Medievalist of some note, and LeGuin stood between =The Odyssey=, =Don Quixote=, =Huck Finn=, =A Hero of Our Times=, =Journey to the East= & a bunch of others. (Yes, there is a common theme here.) I 'd add that is exceptional; most academics have all they can do to master their own (relatively) narrow particulars. And it is just that focussing that tends to exclude SF and other sub-genres from study, more than snobbishness. But as time goes on, it gets hard to contribute any significant to the overall body of literary criticism; a scholar has to cast a wider net. Most of them would rather do that anyhow, just to avoid total boredom. So you do see a gradually increasing number of SF works creeping into serious academic studies. I'm bemused by Stephenson's notion of the Beowulf audience, and the accountability of the Beowulf authors to it, vs. the Dante audience. The original audience for the one was probably the social ancestor of the audience for the other; Beowulf wasn't composed for peasants (although most of its listeners probably were illiterate). That there are different populations an artist is accountable to today (& yesterday) I don't doubt. It is less clear that this accountability translates straightforwardly into literary style or tone or what have you-- see Northrop Frye's =Anatomy of Criticism= (1948, and one of the earliest Structuralist attempts at literary criticism) for a more complete look. If you like. Snarkhunter