A Formalist Approach to Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ's reputation in SF and elsewhere is often based on her pioneering work as a feminist critic and creator of political thought experiment and utopia. But these contributions rest on her literary innovations. Has Russ as a writer been under-read, even by her enthusiasts? This paper presents a formalist reading of Russ in order to uncover some of the feminist art and artistry enabling her politics.
Presnted by: Samantha Murphy
Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To... (1976), crash-lands its characters on an uncharted planet, and is narrated by an unnamed protagonist who understands the ending of this story before anyone else does: their inevitable demise. This promise relies on the establishment and deconstruction of otherwise self-evident assumptions, such as the biological human imperative to reproduce in the interest of furthering the human race. Russ’s political affiliations with radical feminism are the lens through which these assumptions are interrogated: if the human race relies upon a system of reproduction that oppresses its female population, is it worth its continuation?
Much as been written about Russ’s feminism, and the feminist content of her science fiction – her feminist women characters, and their radical actions, edited as exemplary of 1970s feminist science fiction.
As an active and divisive science fiction critic, Russ was and is still credited for her engagement with the generic properties of sf, and my presentation will concern itself with the way this engagement takes place within her own fiction. We Who Are About To…'s ethical interrogation digs deeper than its content and engages with the generic tropes that put her characters in this position in the first place. Her subversion of this otherwise masculinist spacefaring narrative is evident not only through her feminist take on its ethical implications, but through her formal experimentations.
My interests do not exclude the feminist or generic analyses of Russ's writing -- my interest lies in how these agendas interact dialectically and are expressed through form. From a formalist perspective, little has been written of Russ's prose, but close readings of We Who Are About To… reveal Russ's careful deployments of verisimilitude and modernist strategies, making realistic (both scientifically as well as psychologically) an otherwise otherworldly science fiction concept. Evident, too, are the formal similarities with key feminist texts of the same era, such as the dynamic and energetic writing found within Shulamith Firestone's influential The Dialectic of Sex (1970).
This paper will be an extended exercise in formalist reading of We Who Are About To..., treating Russ's prose with the kind of attention that has gone neglected in scholarship of her work. Its seamless transition between familiar science fiction adventure and the political treatise of a dying woman, written in Russ's combative and confronting style, demonstrate a formal complexity that reinforces if not wholly represent the complex ethical labours of its content.
Biography:
Sam Murphy is an MA student in the English Programme, writing a thesis on Joanna Russ’s SF aesthetics. She will present a version of this paper to the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Hawai’i later in June.