Feminist reading

Like most theoretical projects, feminist thought has generated a variety of conceptual models that, in turn, suggest particular reading strategies encompassing diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives. Many feminist scholars undertake humanist-oriented literary analysis, while the materialist critiques of Marxist and socialist feminists and the philosophical deconstructions of French feminists have posed challenges to such relatively straightforward reading practices. Some of the most powerful recent critiques of subject and gender construction have been undertaken by queer-feminists such as Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler (see Wendy Pearson and Helen Merrick in this volume). Other critical models, of particular interest in the context of sf, have been suggested by cyber-theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles, who are concerned with how developments in contemporary science and technology - for instance, advances in reproductive and communications technologies - are shaping and will continue to shape the lives of women.

In Leipzig, Bach's predecessor Johann Kuhnau beat time with a rolled-up sheet of music paper, a common practice in church music (see Fig. 8.1). In Esterháaza, Haydn led his symphonies from the first violin, a typical practice in the symphonic music of his time and region. But in London, when Haydn directed his last symphonies, he sat at the keyboard and shared leadership with the first violinist. Shared leadership was common in opera: overall responsibility belonged to the maestro di capella at the keyboard while the instrumentalists were led by the first violinist. When Mozart directed his operas from the keyboard, he concentrated on the singers but also oversaw the entire performance.

These were the most common leadership practices of the eighteenth century. But today's historically informed performers almost never revive the rolled-up sheet of paper, and they lead from instruments only when the ensembles are relatively small – not, generally, in operas or large symphonies. Modern French Baroque specialists perform the ballet music of Jean-Baptiste Lully with careful consideration of the tension in the bow hairs, but rarely replicate his practice of beating time audibly with a stick. And in large late-eighteenth-century choral works, modern historical performers rarely revive “dual” direction, split between a time-beater for the chorus and an instrumentalist for the rest. Instead, performers typically use today's highly refined conducting technique.

Mary Shelley's decision to start writing short stories for the literary annuals in the 1820s and 1830s is usually represented as discontinuous with her earlier career, part of the fall into commercialism and conservatism occasioned by Percy Shelley's death. Even those who have paid critical attention to the stories often denigrate them. Gregory O'Dea, for instance, writes: “For much of her later literary career, Mary Shelley was a hack writer . . . [She] filled the spaces between her increasingly disregarded novels by turning her pen to essays, reviews, bits of history and travelogue, and, what certainly marks her reduced circumstances, tales for The Keepsake.” One recent biographer calls these “insipid tales for ladies' annuals” “wordy and pedestrian.”

Yet it is important to remember that Mary Shelley always wrote for money. Any sharp distinction between what Shelley wrote for profit, and what she wrote inspired by a creative urge above Mammon would be false, although we may be able to distinguish the degree of financial pressure exerted on her various compositions. Indeed, her first short story, “Mounseer Nongtongpaw,” written when she was ten and a half, made a good profit for her father’s publishing company. Until her father-in-law’s death in 1844, Mary Shelley’s financial situation, throughout her early life, marriage, and most of her widowhood, was never comfortable.

Social isolation, financial stress, and haunting grief over deceased loved ones put Mary Shelley in “deep sorrows” throughout much of the 1830s, yet she found one alleviating source of “pleasure” in the research and writing of biographical essays (L II 257, 209). “[T]here is,” she declared, “no more delightful task” (LL I 116). Biographical writing fascinated Shelley throughout her literary career. At seventeen, she started a life of Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai, himself a memoir writer and man of letters as well as a Girondist leader during the French Revolution. The core narrative of Frankenstein, the creature's account of his own history and the life of Safie, functions as both autobiography and biography. Much of Shelley's later fiction, such as Valperga and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, draws on biographical sources and assumes the shape of fictional life writing. In 1823, Shelley contributed a biographical essay on Rousseau's beloved Madame d'Houdetôt to The Liberal, the radical journal established in Italy by Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron. Several years later, Shelley proposed to the publisher John Murray an ambitious range of biographical ventures, including lives of Madame de Staël, Empress Josephine, Columbus, Mahomet, the “English Philosophers,” and “Celebrated women” (L II 113-15). As Susan J.Wolfson shows in chapter 12, Mary Shelley's 1824 edition of Percy Shelley's Posthumous Poems and her larger 1839 edition of his works feature extensive biographical comments on his life. Shelley also wrote a “Memoir” of her father, William Godwin, for the 1831 reissue of his novel Caleb Williams, and she later composed an advanced draft of his biography, a work she never completed. Shelley joined in many other biographical projects during these years, including her memoir of Lord Byron, now lost, and manuscript notes for a planned life of Percy Shelley, which Thomas Jefferson Hogg later used, or rather distorted, for his life of Percy Shelley (1858). She also produced biographical sketches for Thomas Moore's life of Byron (1830), and Cyrus Redding's portrayal of Percy Shelley in the 1829 Galignani edition of his poetry.

Given that sf is notoriously difficult to define, and that postmodernism is (usually) resistant to any absolute definition, any account of postmodernism and sf risks collapsing under the weight of its own hesitations. This chapter will isolate several theories of postmodernism, examine the interplay of postmodernism and sf and offer a brief critique of postmodernism. It should perhaps be taken for granted that much postmodernism reads like sf.

Definitions

Postmodernism came into critical focus as an approach thanks to an article by Fredric Jameson, and soon became one of the commonest critical approaches to sf. The term pre-dates Jameson; most significantly in architecture ‘postmodernism’ had been used to designate a particular style which rejected the brutalism of modernism in favour of eclecticism, quoting from earlier styles and mixing aesthetics.

In the 1960s and 1970s ‘postmodern’ began to be applied to a series of writers active after 1945 whose works demonstrate knowledge of their own fictionality, either by drawing attention to the creative process of narration, by containing books within books or by breaking down boundaries between author and characters – examples include the works of Beckett, Burroughs and Borges. Kurt Vonnegut is perhaps the author who has most featured himself as a character within his own science fictions – partly in the debate about sf in the novels featuring Kilgore Trout, but most clearly in his interventions into such narratives as Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), drawing on his experience in Dresden after the Allied bombing raid, or Breakfast of Champions (1973), especially at the end when he sets his characters free. It should be emphasized that Vonnegut here is just another character, just as Tom Robbins is when doing battle with his typewriter in Still Life With Woodpecker (1980) and Robert Sheckley when he tries to get his narrative to work in Options (1975).

Much present-day conductor training is moribund, weighted down by highly questionable tradition and surrounded by self-serving myths and misconceptions. The training of conductors remains virtually unchanged from the early days of the composer-conductor timekeepers who stood before their bands of players with a complete knowledge of the creative fabric of their own compositions, but without a stitch of conducting technique. Conductor training still concentrates on learning and understanding the music, at the expense of the technical expertise needed to convey this knowledge to the orchestra. No other component of the symphonic world has remained so resistant to change, so we continue to graduate nineteenth-century conductors in the twenty-first century. The entire subject of conductor training needs fresh ideas, open minds, and a willingness to create a rapport with a new technical proficiency based on the demands of the music.

Four factors have kept contemporary conductor training from embracing new techniques. (1) The separation of pulse and music, which first emerged in the divided leadership of the eighteenth century, has fostered the notion that the two are indeed separable. (2) Traditional beat patterns have been accepted as the sum of conducting technique. (3) The myth of the “born conductor” continues to subvert the new models of training; why bother with classes if charisma is the central ingredient? (4) The increasing virtuosity of the orchestra has made the job of the modern conductor easier; modern professionals are capable of playing much standard repertoire without any leadership at all.

Mary Shelley's waking nightmare on June 16, 1816, gave birth to one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization. Frankenstein can claim the status of a myth so profoundly resonant in its implications that it has become, at least in its barest outline, a trope of everyday life. The condemners of genetically modified meats and vegetables now refer to them as “Frankenfoods,” and the debates concerning the morality of cloning or stem cell engineering constantly invoke the cautionary example of Frankenstein's monster. Nor is the monster-myth cited only in regard to the biological sciences; critics of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons alike often make use of this monitory figure. Of course, both the media and the average person in the street have frequently and mistakenly assigned the name of Frankenstein not to the maker of the monster but to his creature. But as we shall see, this “mistake” actually derives from a crucial intuition about the relationship between them. Frankenstein is our culture's most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern “scientific” man, of the dangers inherent in scientific research, and of the horrifying but predictable consequences of an uncontrolled technological exploitation of nature and the female.

The history of conducting is hardly a linear progression of technical watersheds. The modern practice of conducting emerges slowly over several generations, but through a variety of different practices in different countries, genres and venues. During the first half of the nineteenth century, audible time-beating, different forms of divided leadership, and violin-bow direction all continue, with experiments in where to stand, which way to face, what to hold and generally what to do to bring order as larger ensembles struggle to play increasingly complex music.

To complicate things further, the rise of conducting happens while other aspects of European music-making are changing. The eighteenth-century musician may not have had a high place in society, but it was a clear place. The Kapellmeister was either a civil or high-level private servant charged with providing musical events from start to finish. This would generally include composing, copying, rehearsing, and performing the music. Musicians “wrote” music largely as notes for their own performances. Then technological changes made cheap music printing and mass-produced pianos possible. Political and economic changes ended the wealth of many royal patrons, who disbanded their orchestras and “freed” the musicians, creating a new middle-class market for their services. While musicians tried to piece together a living from teaching, composing, and performing (in both private and the new public concerts), music-making fragmented. The ability to purchase a piece of music on paper (instead of hiring musicians to perform) was a profound shift.

In this letter of September 1827 to Frances Wright, the Scottish-born author and social reformer, Mary Shelley reveals just how much she felt her life and thought to be shaped by the social and political ideals of her parents, William Godwin, the leading radical philosopher of the 1790s, and his wife, the proto-feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The multiple literary, political, and philosophical influences of Godwin and Wollstonecraft may be traced in all six of Mary Shelley's full-length novels, as well as in her tales, biographies, essays, and other shorter writings. Yet while she consistently wrote within the framework established by her parents' concerns, she was no mere imitator of their works. Writing with an awareness of how French revolutionary politics had unfolded through the Napoleonic era, Mary Shelley extends and reformulates the many-sided legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft in extreme, imaginatively arresting ways. Those legacies received their most searching reappraisal in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley's remarkable first novel, and were reexamined a year later in Matilda, a novella telling the story of incestuous love between father and daughter, which, though it remained unpublished until 1959, has now become one of her best-known works.

Travel writing is both overture and finale to Mary Shelley's career. Her History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), an account of two continental trips co-authored with Percy Bysshe Shelley, marks an exuberant coming of age: it bursts with young love, defiance of parental control, and a search for political meaning. Her pensive Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) mourns the deaths of her husband and two of her children as well as the loss of her own health, but ultimately comes to terms with those losses, expressing chastened joy at the pleasures that remain: the company of her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, and of his friends; the delights of travel; the beauty of mountains and sea, painting and music. Rambles also assesses her political losses and those of a generation of English liberals, whose hopes were raised by the French Revolution but dashed by its terroristic and imperialistic results.

History of a Six Weeks’ Tour sounds a variation of the customary “Grand Tour,” in which young English aristocratic men capped a university education with a two- to three-year journey to France and Italy, accompanied by a tutor. Ostensibly committed to polishing their French and studying Roman antiquities in situ, these young men often pursued sexual adventure as well, while their extended absence displayed, at home, the wealth of their families. Thus, by traveling abroad, the son and his family both acquired what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital.1 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour took new, more inclusive, forms: shortened versions affordable by the middle class and continental honeymoons that included women in the ranks of travelers.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the conductor developed into an independent musical being, who took sole charge of the performance and was devoted generally to the execution of scores by others. With the deaths of Wagner and Brahms, the public's admiration and loyalty shifted from the composer to the virtuoso conductor. On posters, programs, and record jackets, the names of conductors grew larger as they gradually began to dominate the publicity that accompanied orchestral and operatic performances. By the middle of the twentieth century, conductors had become central to the marketing of music by record companies, opera houses, and concert organizations and were powerful figures in the music business.

With the increasing dominance of the conductor in the nineteenth century, two types of conducting emerged: Mendelssohn's more mechanical model of a “transparent” conductor, as preserved at the Leipzig Conservatory, and the more “subjective” approach of Liszt and Wagner, where the execution of the “external” musical details was dependent upon finding the true “internal” meaning of the work. The latter idealist view became dominant and helped to establish both a core repertory of Austro-German musical works and the German Romantic ideology that sustained them. As the visibility of composers diminished, their scores gradually acquired an iconic status and later conductors challenged this model of performance, proposing a reversal of interpretative loyalty from the interior to the surface of the score. By the middle of the twentieth century, the printed material was paramount and the modifications that a conductor could make to the text were severely limited.

It was not until the mid-1930s that a Russian school of conducting began to reap what had been so carefully sown at the beginning of the century. In the constant swinging back and forth of the pendulum whereby Western conductors were welcome (in the late 1920s), then avoided (up to the dissolution of the Association of Proletarian Musicians in 1932), then welcome again, and finally shunned when Stalin turned his country upside down in 1937, there turned out to be more virtue than necessity in relying on homegrown talent. Since then, the line has been unbroken, and even at a time when the ranks of the old guard are rapidly diminishing, the tradition seems to have passed effortlessly to a whole new generation of younger conductors taking up positions with orchestras in the West.

Illustrious visitors: the nineteenth century

Russia in the nineteenth century was far too busy establishing and consolidating its musical institutions to breed that luxury, the great interpreter. In any case, the rival factions who so blurred the lines of real distinction in the 1860s, combined with the lack of any recorded evidence, make it difficult for us to establish any kind of objective truth. Was that leader of a truly national aesthetic, Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), a fine or a mediocre conductor when he took charge of the Russian Musical Society concerts?

Science fiction film: the first fifty years

In the first book of film theory, written in 1915, Vachel Lindsay imagined a modern America transformed into a permanent World's Fair. Central to his poetic vision of the coming technocracy was the cinema, whose 'prophetwizards will set before the world a new group of pictures of the future' surpassing even Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells. Lindsay's peculiar rhetoric has obvious resonances with the interplay of entertainment, education and prophecy in Gernsback's model of scientifiction, but as the manifesto for a new kind of cinema it found few, if any, adherents - not least because sf cinema had been developing in a different direction since the Lumière brothers' Charcuterie méchanique (The Mechanical Butcher, 1895). A one-minute, single-scene short, it showed a pig being fed into a machine from which various cuts of pork soon emerge. Audiences might well have also seen the film projected in reverse, and one of its imitators, Dog Factory (Porter, 1904), utilized this basic technique to depict a machine that reconstituted strings of sausages into whatever breed of dog the customer required.

If there is a clear turning point in the history of British conducting – a point at which the modern era may be said to begin – it is marked by the arrival in England of the Italian conductor Michele Costa (1808–84). In 1829, Costa was sent by the composer Niccolò Zingarelli to direct a Birmingham performance of the latter's Cantata on the Book of Isaiah, Chapter XII, though in the event he only sang in it. The following year Costa settled in London, where he became maestro al piano at the King's Theatre and adopted the anglicized Christian name Michael. He made his mark quickly and indelibly. In less than two years he had abolished the prevailing system of dual leadership (see chapter 8) at the King's Theatre, and established himself as sole director, with the baton as his tool and symbol of authority.

London audiences had seen visiting conductors use the baton before, notably Spohr, Weber, and Mendelssohn; but as a resident Costa was able to carry on a sustained campaign. Nearly four decades after Costa's appointment at the King's Theatre, George Bernard Shaw wrote that