The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 80
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theory that cannot hold its own weight disappears rapidly. But a general trend in form and
execution like the little weird, with its roots in a centuries-old tradition of weird, of speculation,
and of romance will inevitably find ways to converse with science. In Yevgeny Zamytin's We,
characters walk unaided on the wings of a spacecraft; in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man,
trends in cognitive evolution lead to postmodern psi-conflicts; and in works like "Lull," "The
Yellow Chamber," and the others I have mentioned, time takes its proper role as a cognitive
metaphor, as what Protagorus referred to as the internal measure. The telling of stories becomes
the unified field, not who tells them, and certainly not to whom they are told. We are our stories;
we are our metaphors and anachronies and creator-created recursions-and nothing gets to us
except through them. Even though cognitive science has not yet unlocked all of the black boxes
of the brain, the intersection of cognition and narrative that appears in the little weird has at least
begun modeling these remaining mysteries with, perhaps, a brief, backward glance at the
surrealist tradition. After all, as Dennett points out "of all the things in the environment an active
body must make mental models of, none is more crucial than the model an agent has of itself."37
Notes to Chapter 4
1 Roland Barthes demonstrates in S/Z that readers do not necessarily unpack meaning one
word at a time, per se; rather, "Although every unit we mention here will be a signifier, this one
is of a very special type: it is the signifier par excellence because of its connotation . . . We shall
call this element a signifier. . . or a seine (semantically, the seme is the unit of the signifier."
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans., Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 17 (italics
original). Barthes here refers to Saussure's seminal theory of semiology involving linguistic
signifiers and the signifieds they point to. Meaning may unfold for story-receivers several words80
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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/m1/84/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .