Farah Mendlesohn > Quotes

“One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text, and Clarke takes advantage of this figuring. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is in the footnotes that the world of the fantastic slips through to disrupt the meaning or common understanding of the tale told in the main text. The “explanation” they offer is of worlds slipping between each other, of uncontrolled contact with fairy.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“Increasingly–and mirroring what was happening in American politics–Heinlein would attract single-issue or single-novel admirers. Starship Troopers was just the first inkling of this.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

“Whether readers loved or loathed a book, whether reading for pleasure or for criticism, there has been a repeated tendency to take the strongest character voice in a Heinlein novel as an authorial voice, as in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), or in Time Enough for Love (1973); or to read a political system as either flawless and to be taken as a political rallying cry for libertarianism, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), or as a rallying cry for white supremacy, as in Farnham’s Freehold (1964). Neither extreme is true.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

“Neither they nor Warren Rochelle (‘ Dual Attractions’, 1999) nor Chris West (‘ Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies’, 2002) (who focuses on homosexuality) ground their critiques in the periods in which Heinlein was writing, the editors he was writing for, or the librarians who could decide whether books did or did not make it onto the shelves in a period in which libraries were only just starting to retreat from the position of major purchasers.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

“Oddly, Leon Stover, in Robert A. Heinlein, one of the best close readers in other ways, comes away with the idea that Heinlein ‘defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilisation’ (p. 61) which is a hard argument to make given the amount of out-of-wedlock sex in his work and the satirisation of so much Christian practice in Stranger in a Strange Land and Job.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

“In this book I argue that there are essentially four categories within the fantastic: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal. These categories are determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world. In the portal-quest we are invited through into the fantastic; in the intrusion fantasy, the fantastic enters the fictional world; in the liminal fantasy, the magic hovers in the corner of our eye; while in the immersive fantasy we are allowed no escape. Each category has as profound an influence on the rhetorical structures of the fantastic as does its taproot text or genre. Each category”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“In many of the novels I have discussed in this chapter, the position of the reader vis-a-vis the protagonist is central to the construction of liminality.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“Is it possible to create a world in which anything can and does happen?”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“It is not clear when cats became a ‘thing’ in science fiction but Heinlein made a significant contribution to their presence and to the construction of that presence.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

“Can one have an internal quest that does not require the protagonist to move through a physical and internal landscape?”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“a”
― Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

“The intrusion fantasy uses the form of the club story - the unquestioned tale - to construct reality, then renders the walls of the world-story translucent.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy