From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 21:38:54 MDT
At 08:10 PM 9/15/02 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>Is it *impossible* to unearth the unarticulated
>assumptions that underlie each position?
It's pretty hard to get people with strong opinions even to *listen* to the
case built from different perspectives. To me, one of the most astonishing
examples of this effect has been the wholesale negative and usually enraged
condemnation of the literary/political analyst H. Bruce Franklin's ROBERT
A. HEINLEIN: America as Science Fiction (1980). I have never seen any
attempt by `the right' or libertarians to come to grips with Franklin's
brilliant close reading of Heinlein's oeuvre in its cultural setting. It is
candidly marxist; I personally do not subscribe to Franklin's ideology, but
I find his detailed analysis quite thrillingly and disturbingly effective.
Yet I have the feeling that dedicated and clever Heinlein enthusiasts such
as James Gifford *simply could not bear to read* Franklin, even if their
eyes tracked all the words.
Now maybe this is appropriate and understandable, given certain premises.
Would anyone bother to read a long denunciation of Martin Luther King's
writings (since that's all it would be, surely) by the Grand Imperial
Wizard of the KKK? Still, there are surprising findings in Franklin's study
that help account for Heinlein's impact and also his limitations, and they
are not going to be unearthed soon by a critic more sympathetic to RAH.
Does it help to know that Franklin's own ideological position is radically
leftist? Of course, and luckily he makes this blazingly apparent in every
sentence. It is an *objective* fact of his reading position. I wonder,
though, how many people on this list can observe their own axe-grindings
with equal candor?
Is this comment at all relevant to your point, Lee?
Damien Broderick
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