Quiz 1: What Is Speculative Fiction?

Part I. Multiple Choice

Circle the letter of the best answer.

1. Jauss calls genre a “horizon of expectation.” On this account, genre lets a reader:

   1. Decode and appraise a new text through prior experience with similar texts. Answer
   2. Predict exactly how any story in the genre will end.
   3. Rank works by their degree of consecration.
   4. Separate literary fiction from genre fiction.

2. Darko Suvin defines science fiction by “the presence and interaction of” which two things?

   1. Science and technology.
   2. Wonder and terror.
   3. The past and the future.
   4. Estrangement and cognition. Answer

3. For most of its history, SF was not considered literature. What was it considered instead?

   1. High culture, subsidized by benefactors as “art for art’s sake.”
   2. Scientific writing, and therefore “non-literary.”
   3. Entertainment: mass-market, pulp, genre fiction, often for young readers. Answer
   4. A branch of High Modernism.

Part II. Key Terms

Define each term in two or three sentences.

4. Novum

   Model answer

   A novum (Latin for “new thing”) is the new element, usually in science fiction, that makes a fictional world recognizably different from the author’s own. The classic example is the time machine in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895).

5. Literature, as that word has been used since the late nineteenth century

   Model answer

   Since the late nineteenth century, “literature” has meant imaginative writing like poems, novels, and plays, as opposed to scientific or informational writing, which came to be called “non-literary.” In the twentieth century it was redefined as a special kind of language (“literariness”). By mid-century, High Modernists like Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner were the model of literature, and popular fiction like SF was pushed down into “genre” or sub-literary writing.

Part III. Short Response

6. Name two changes that led critics, scholars, and literary authors to take SF seriously.

   Model answer

   Other acceptable answers: the shift from a textual to a visual culture, which rewards SF’s capacity for spectacle; the New Wave of the 1960s and 70s.

   One change is that SF became the dominant genre of popular storytelling, from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to superhero stories, so it was hard to ignore. Another is that literary authors started writing in or near genre fiction, like Toni Morrison, whose Beloved is a ghost story.

7. What is close reading? How is it different from reading for fun?

   Model answer

   Close reading has been the main method of literary studies since the twentieth century. A close reader notices a detail in someone else’s words that seems to matter, stops, and rereads. If that detail changes how the whole work makes sense, the reader explains it to someone else and argues that the work should be understood in light of it. Reading for fun keeps moving for the story, without stopping to ask why a detail is there or making an argument about it.