Whose Nostalgia Is It, Anyway?

Abstract

295 BOOKS IN REVIEW hope that may exist must lie in the proles, but the later conversation between Winston and an elderly prole in a pub decisively extinguishes that faint utopian glimmer. I may add that Milner’s critique gains little by quite wrongly associating Jameson with Trotskyism, though Milner does, rather inadvertently, raise the potentially interesting question of whether Jameson’s own aversion to Trotskyism is quite coherent with the immense intellectual debt that he owes to Ernest Mandel (whose indispensable work Milner, elsewhere in the volume, inexplicably and pointlessly derogates in a breezy unargued aside). Even, however, on those—not infrequent—occasions when I am most certain that Milner is dead wrong, I find his arguments to be generally intelligent, stimulating, and worth considering. Though most of the material in Again, Dangerous Visions was already available in far-flung periodical publication, Milner’s editor and publisher have performed a real service in collecting these essays into a single volume, making it much easier to grasp the contours and development of Milner’s thought and the range of his interests. That said, I must add that I am glad to have my free reviewer’s copy. For there must be many readers, particularly graduate students, who would find this book absorbing and illuminating but who will be quite unable to afford the purchase price.—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University Whose Nostalgia Is It, Anyway? Claire Nally. Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 290 pp. $98.50 hc. Steampunk is a genre characterized, in part, by a complicated relationship to nostalgia. In Steampunk: Gender, Subculture, and the Neo-Victorian, Claire Nally joins others in observing as much and, writing about gender representations most specifically, remarks on steampunk texts’ tendencies to reject the simple pleasures of nostalgia: “Each [text] interrogates and parodies Victorian models of gender behavior, and rather than offer a nostalgia for these bygone models, approaches them with suspicion as much as fascination” (129-30). Occasionally I wonder if this is why I like (why anyone likes?) steampunk: it acknowledges the pull of nostalgic revelry, but will not let us have it simply or cheaply. Nostalgic revelry is hardly rare in a career spent working on college campuses. The younger and differently oriented relationship to campus has a wistful tone—fewer meetings, more scansion—but even the anxieties, having been largely triumphed over, seem somewhat charming in retrospect. The varying panics of graduate school life—the imposter syndrome that never really goes away, the slow-dawning realization that your professors’ careers (and teaching loads) look nothing like yours will, the heavy-hearted scan through the MLA job list—are certainly less sharp, at minimum. Perhaps most vividly I remember the anxiety that precipitated every writing assignment in the early years: how on earth will I find something new to say about this text that is so old? How to avoid a simple and fawning recapitulation of all that has already been said? How might one, to use Nally’s language, approach the 296 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) canon and its attendant critical conversation with both “suspicion as much as fascination?” One gets over this anxiety, of course. One finds new ways of approaching Dickens, and new resonances for Shakespeare, and new relevance for Mary Shelley. Maybe we start with an under-theorized passage, maybe we map a new comparison, or maybe we find a new political urgency for reading a contemporary crisis via a dated text. One way or another, we all find our way into these canonical texts (even if some of us leave them behind once the credentialing is done) and make something of the layers and ambiguities that have been seen and re-seen so many times. Still, for most of us, I suspect, there is a lingering anxiety about how novel our novelties really are. Surely, the nag goes, someone has thought of this before. The counter to this anxiety, in my experience, is often the invigorating comfort that comes with investigating and writing about very new literary texts and artistic movements. In those new texts, we can chart new ground and not worry that our textual reading...