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blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 10 May 2009

…the intellectual curse of vapid, simpleminded postmodernism has been slow to dissipate from hundreds of university English, Literature and social studies departments. One symptom of this obdurate troglodytism has been the refusal of all but a dozen U.S. universities to pay more than nodding attention to science fiction, the most exploratory and truly American of all genres. Another diagnosable illness is the slavish devotion that so many have pledged to the rigid storytelling tropes that Joseph Campbell called “fundamental” to myth. These rigid prescriptions may have been nearly ubiquitous for 4,000 years, but nobody seems willing to also point out the downside — that those bardic straightjackets were also fundamentally debasing of the human imagination, helping to limit and crush our shared cultural experience… until we finally broke free of our chains. David Brin

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