The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 79
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non-space between them both, that non-space now occupying the position of the real. They exist
physically in a space beyond our physics, a space that we cannot for certain say involves our
time. Though it may involve time, it also interpretively must not (as Dennett shows with his
demonstration of what cannot exist in the world of Sherlock Holmes). The events in "The
Yellow Chamber," through the story's conclusion, become un-timed. Ford, then, dodges linearity
differently than Link, but no less effectively. Doug Lain accomplishes a similar feat in "The '84
Regress" when the narrator explains "The year 1984 never ended" (3).35 Alex Irvine does no less
in "Gus Dream of Biting the Mailman": the final, brief segment in the story begins with "What it
all boils down to is this, this one end that is eternally present" (70).36 And these are but a few
examples of the maneuver. The little weird offers many more within its bounds, and true to its
liminal-genre nature, even a few beyond.
Conclusion
Literature, of course, has no inherent responsibility to represent consciousness. However,
it is in its nature to tend to do so, as David Lodge's brief historical sketch demonstrates. As I said
previously, art is nothing if not a record of our abstractions. Over time, how we conceive
ourselves and the literature that explores this cannot help but collide. The boom in electronic
publication, correspondence, and internet blogging leads every day to exponentially more and
more discourse about the nature of expression and how best to fit it into cultural negotiation.
Literary criticism and literary theory, as I stated in the introduction, no longer belong solely to
Academe; further, the blurring of the lines between high art and low and a growing distaste for
genre classification has only increased the merge between theoretical debate and everyday
conversation. In the dynamically involute, blogosphere-informed textual communities of today,79
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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/m1/83/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .