Starboard Vineyard Tours 3: To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, Russ
Description
This episode, we’re going to delve into the nonfiction writings of Joanna Russ, one of the major writers and critics of the New Wave of science fiction. She’s best known for The Female Man (1975) - a striking novel that we’ve both been meaning to read, we swear. The collection To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995) covers a lot of ground, so we’ve selected a set of essays to focus on, giving particular attention to “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction,” “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction,” “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write,” “Recent Feminist Utopias,” and “On ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” The essays cover a wide swathe of her career as a critic, so we both bemoan how some of the things Russ points out haven’t changed, and ponder some of the genres and ideas she highlights that have fallen out of fashion. Since this is a collection covering decades of writing, we get a chance to see both her lasting methodology and interests, and some of the ways her priorities and opinions changed over time.
Topics: Subjunctivity, utopia, feminism, the Gothic, academic criticism, and many more.
Next month, we read the first section (Poetics) of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979) - possibly the most influential text in science fiction studies. You can find it on the Internet Archive.
United States
