Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative

The Example of William Gibson

Datos Bibliográficos

ID23178243
AutoresClaire Sponsler (autor de correspondencia)
Año1992
Volumen33
Número4
Páginas625
Fecha de publicación1992-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaContemporary Literature (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0010-7484 • E-ISSN: 1548-9949
EditorialUniversity of Wisconsin Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/1208645
OpenAlexW2320325367
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10

n recent years science fiction has with some success struggled against its ghettoization as lowbrow genre fiction. Readers and critics have defended science fiction as having not only tradition of its own but also considerable overlap with modernist and postmodernist literature. Simultaneously, theorists like Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Donna Haraway have turned to as, in Annette Kuhn's words, a privileged cultural site for enactments of the postmodern condition (178). Indeed, for many cultural critics, has become the pre-eminent literary genre of the postmodern era, since it alone seems capable of understanding the rapid technological and cultural changes occurring in late capitalist, postindustrial society. In spite of this highbrow interest in science fiction, borders are still policed, and the ghetto endures. Even an apologist for like Darko Suvin can say dismissively that only 5 to 10 percent of SF is aesthetically in contrast to the ninety to ninetyfive percent that is strictly perishable stuff (vii). As Roger Luckhurst notes, in the postmodern discourse about SF, science fiction is seen as borrowing from the mainstream always belatedly, derivatively, and in degraded form (362). may have acquired new visibility outside its own coterie, especially among theorists, but old value hierarchies still work to keep books out of the hands of highand middlebrow readers. Hence, like the New Wave and ecofeminist of the 1960s and 1970s, cyberpunk, the most significant development in science fiction in the 1980s, is not widely known

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Sociology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction