"James E. Gunn - Academic Viewpoint" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

course in science fiction was taught at Colgate University in 1962- by Prof.
Mark Hillegas, now at Southern Illinois, and Sam Moskowitz organized evening
courses in science fiction at City College of New York in 1953 and 1954.

Since then science fiction has spread into thousands of college classrooms and
tens of thousands of high schools, and even into junior high schools and
primary schools.

This surprising interest of academia in science fiction has aroused suspicion
and alarm among science
fiction readers, writers, and editors. Their attitudes have been summed up by
Ben Bova's editorial "Teaching Science Fiction" in Analog (June 1974) and
Lester del Rey's "The Siren Song of Academe" in Galaxy (March 1975), and
symbolized by Locus coeditor and co-publisher Dena Brown's comment at the 1970
organizing meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, "Let's take
science fiction out of the classroom and put it back in the gutter where it
belongs."

Part of what frightens science fiction people about academia is the danger
that it will be taught poorly, dustily, inadequately, or drably. But even if
taught with knowledge, skill, and enthusiasm, science fiction may be perverted
by the academic viewpoint, some of them believe.

Teachers, they suspect, look at books differently from ordinary readers, and,
like Medusa, their look turns things to stone. Science fiction readers point
at their own high school experiences of hating Shakespeare or Dickens because
they were forced to read them.

Even at the college level, professors encounter the frequent student attitude:
"Why do we have to analyze fiction or poetry? It ruins them."

These are the concerns of the science fiction world How does academia respond?

First, the notion that all science fiction teachers are alike is simply lack
of knowledge about what is done in the classroom. Science fiction is taught
for a variety of reasons, at all levels. In colleges, for instance, it often
is taught for its content to help teach political science or psychology,
anthropology, religion, future studies, or even the hard sciences. Anthologies
for these specific purposes multiply in publishers' catalogs. Most objections
to the teaching of science fiction, however, do not concern themselves with
this use, although a bit of feeling adheres to the exploitation of science
fiction for some other purpose than the one God intended.

Even within English departments, teaching approaches vary. Some professors
teach the ideas; some, .,' the themes; some, the history and the genre; and
some, `' the great books. In general, all of these may be dismissed from the
concerns of the science fiction vested interests; if any of the subjects are
taught knowledgeably and capably, the judgments of their teachers about
approaches ideas, themes, definitions, history, and great books need not
coincide with those of any held within the science fiction world, where there