The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 3
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events occur, focal primacy is placed not upon these events but upon the characters or focalizors
and their (often) broken relationships with themselves and others.3 The invasion of the weird into
the narrative framework is a given: it is offered as speculative staple out of which these stories
are built. What is far more unapproachable is the self, destabilized as it has become by cognitive
science and social upheaval. The worlds of technological and social innovation have largely
caught up to speculative fiction, leaving its characters in the same quandaries of self suffered by
its readers. John Clute, addressing this problem in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
asks "Can sf, as a set of cognitions which differ from the world, exist in a world which takes on
the colouring of our thought? What now is figure, what now is ground? What now is difference,
what now is mission statement?"4 The little weird answers by dodging the question: the sublime
is not in accepting a lack of understanding with some unknowable and indefinable event or thing;
the sublime comes in accepting the impossibility of understanding a self that, in relation to the
world that has caught up to its speculation, as Clute points out, is in a constant state of flux.
Under these circumstances, "strange" events are metaphors for the socio-cognitive uncertainty of
being.
The little weird also inverts the typical power-relations found in magical realism.
Traditionally, magical realism has concerned itself with juxtaposing the magical (typified as non-
Western, post-colonial, and anti-positivistic) against the real (Western, rational, and
epistemologically intolerant).5 This mode has opened narrative opportunities for cultural voices
that have previously, under the oppression of what Maggie Ann Bowers calls "totalitarian
regimes," struggled to be heard.6 In this literature, the magic is presented just as matter-of-factly
as the real, therefore theorizing either a new order entirely that breaks the logic separating the
magic from the real or simply theorizing that the magic (whatever it represents) exists even in the
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/7/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .