Last week, I had a wonderful meeting with my adviser and mentor, Jim Proctor. He put my budding thesis into a language that connects it even more explicitly to my area of interest: the fiction of unsettled landscapes. Further, we discussed the various structures of fiction and literature in regards to my previous interest in reader-response theory. As reader-response theory implicates an intensely disjointed network of actors, I am leaning away from incorporating audience responses into my thesis. Instead, the authorial production of fiction may prove to be more doable, and perhaps even more interdisciplinary. In this way, I am looking at the production of fiction responding to and representing unsettled seismic landscapes. While this is not necessarily limited to the United States, I aim to focus my literary search to the United States and Japan. While notions of place are incredibly important to my analysis, I am mostly interested in the lived experience of the author and the intent of the producer in relation to the text. This evokes certain questions about the fictionality and reality of fiction and the quality of fiction as it relates to the lived truths embedded in it.
One aspect of this inquiry has to do with the accuracy of the science in science fiction (SF) regarding earthquakes and its importance to the quality of the art. In examining the subgenres of SF, the term “hard SF” describes the type of SF where the science plays a fundamental role in the plot. While there are many disputes about the necessity or accuracy of describing hard SF as a genre, there are chapters in several sci-fi criticism anthologies about hard SF. As Kathryn Cramer discusses in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, hard SF began undifferentiated from the umbrella SF genre, unlike other sub-genres that emerged in response to political or social conditions. Cramer encourages critics interested in parsing out the definitions and specific conventions of hard SF to look towards author intent, identification, interviews, and selected essays to explore the range of activities occurring under the label hard SF. Ideas of subgenre are valuable for me to keep in mind with my work, but not necessarily foundational for the theoretical frameworks of my argument. I may, however, make the case that certain texts should qualify as hard SF. This might be an interesting way to categorize my data but I’m not sure if it will necessarily get me anywhere.
Wolfgang Iser’s essay on the reality of fiction was among the most foundational pieces of literature I’ve read so far in my research. Although Iser is known for being a fundamental critic in reader-response theory, this piece went beyond reader-response into the theories of reality that I am most interested in studying. He reinforces the notion of a text as a container, which will be useful for discussing the creation and filling of the container. I think the most useful theoretical model Iser explores is the text as a node on a system of context and situation, and in particular, the text as a comment on the system. In this way, the text has the ability to highlight instabilities of the system by showing them strengthened or weakened. He uses 18th century moral novels as an example. He describes a paradigm of reality in which the text represents reality and “so indivisibly and simultaneously forms reality” (Iser 1975, 29). His discussion of unstable social systems will be interesting to compare to literature which comments on unstable physical systems, such as earthquakes. Does that literature also “form” reality? This provokes certain questions about the nature – culture divide that takes up so much space in the environmental studies.
Andrew Milner’s book Locating Science Fiction is a very thorough history of science fiction from the Romantic period to the modern media discourse surrounding the field. In the final chapter “The Uses of Science Fiction” 
Milner discusses several major themes relevant to my thesis. He explores the value-laden norms present in much science fiction and argues that SF has the potential to be value-free. However, “much SF has been both deliberately intended by its authors and deliberately received by its readers as crucially value-relevant” (Milner 180). This justifies the relevance of studying these values to the environmental studies. He differentiates between natural catastrophes such as floods and catastrophic climate change, providing examples for each. This chapter is a useful survey of different conceptions of environmental SF from critics and authors, as well as an interesting snapshot of the actors in the text and media SF networks.
My goal for this week in terms of my data analysis was to read Haruki Murakami’s after the quake, a book of short stories set in Japan between the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the gas attacks in Tokyo. This fiction responds to these disasters by showing the cracks in the human relationships. There are themes of sex and marriage present in the stories. As well, there are beautifully rich passages of text that implicate the earthquake in direct and indirect way. The way in which the earthquake frames and underlies the stories is very interesting and may mirror the actual ground on which we walk.
Works Cited