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Loading... Story Matricesby Gillian Polack
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Distinctions
The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping. The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions. Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding, colonialism, diasporic experiences, own voices, ethics, selective forgetting and silencing. They illuminate ways in which speculative fiction is important for cultural transmission. This study uses cultural encoding and baggage within speculative fiction to decode critical elements of modern English-language culture. No library descriptions found. |
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However, this desperately needed a better edit than it got. Stray punctuation, repetition of phrases where it didn't make sense (ie. sentences that felt like they'd been half re-written, after part of the idea was moved earlier in the chapter). Polack acknowledges that there were multiple events that interfered with the production of this book, and my guess would be that print deadlines won out over robust editing.
I hope that this will become a foundational work on a topic that isn't widely written about, if at all. There are sections where Polack only has their previous work to point at, acknowledging that the scholarship just isn't there. Which must be frustrating as the writer--as it is as the reader--because the value of this kind of work for me is in the dialogue amongst and between the experts, which couldn't happen. ( )