wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> It depends on what your trying to do by examining that crap. An
> interesting contrast to this statement might be the examination that
> Antonio Gramsci gives to very bad literature (missionary tracts, fascist
> magazine article, etc.) in his Prison Notebooks. Obviously, Gramsci is
> trying to see how this crap work (or doesn't work) in producing a
> national-popular culture and isn't really interested in focusing on
> denouncing the material as crap per se (although SF criticism has a
> healthy and entertaining strain of material that does just this...
> started by Damon Knight in In Search of Wonder....) robert wood
I would agree with this, and there are probably other exceptions. I am thinking mostly of those cultivated sneers which seem designed mostly to exhibit the superior taste of the sneerer: "I'm above such stuff, really!" "How vulgar." "You don't really like _that_, do you!" The adult version of the teenage fear of not being cool.
Carrol