Comparative Literature, World-Systems Theory and Science Fiction

Abstract

Media and cultural studies have been one of few recent growth areas in the academic humanities and social sciences, especially in the United States and other Anglophone societies. At times, they have clearly threatened to subsume or sideline more traditional forms of literary study. Given that the latter had often exhibited a kind of cultural elitism simultaneously contemptuous of “mass culture„, women and the non-Western world, this is not necessarily the occasion for much regret. But we need to remember that print literature is still an important mass medium in its own right and a significant element in contemporary culture. Reading the curricula for cultural studies programmes or the conference abstracts for cultural studies conferences, one could be forgiven for supposing that film had somehow supplanted print in the late twentieth century. But, as Bennett, Emison and Frow, for example, found from the most comprehensive survey to date of Australian cultural practices and preferences, cinema is actually far less popular than book reading (Bennett et al. 84). Similar findings have been reported from many other western societies. Moreover, even if literature were to disappear from the cultural repertoire — as, of course, it eventually might — it would continue to be a crucial resource for cultural studies approaches to the historical past. As Raymond Williams — one of the “founding fathers„ of British cultural studies, no less — rightly insisted: here, “in the only examples we have of recorded communication that outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon.„ (Williams 1965: 64-5)