Word: burt
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Apart from Burt, what do so many undergraduates gain from this ostensibly niche subject? For some, it’s the tantalizing possibility of being able to think outside the literary box and extrapolate from the page to society at large. Ian J. Storey ’10, a student in the course and a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, says, “Because SF takes place in unusual worlds where new things are possible, societies or situations can be set up to ask fascinating ‘what if’ questions...
...Burt sees similar value in the works studied in the course. “The study of science fiction helps us think about social and political life outside literature,” he says, “because in science fiction the effect of material conditions on individual lives becomes unignorable.” According to Burt, this perspective is in contradistinction to other forms of prose that students often encounter...
This is not to say that Burt is ready to quit his day job as an author and critic of poetry and more traditional prose. “I don’t think we need to have ‘Science Fiction’ available to study every year, in the way we need to have Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf available,” he explains. “But I do think science fiction is important and interesting and includes some wonderful works...
...what they read, whatever the genre. “Part of learning to read attentively is learning to pick up on those signals a text gives out about what you should expect, so you can see when that text and its language violate those expectations,” Burt says. Originality, in other words, is only perceptible if the reader knows what conventions have been broken...
According to Burt, science fiction, as a highly self-conscious genre, lends itself to this sort of analysis. But being cognizant of how a text expects to be read, he says, is as important for comprehending poetry as it is for understanding science fiction. For Burt, the experience of reading Robert Heinlein and Octavia Butler is similar to going line-by-line through the poetry of John Ashbery or Jorie Graham. Reading science fiction helps students grasp other literature as much as it encourages them to ponder space ships, telekinesis, and sentient robots...