The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction

by Samuel R. Delany

From the four-time Nebula Award-winning author, a keystone text in literary theory and science fiction analyzing a 1972 work of dystopian fiction.The American Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch--"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes's commentary on Balzac's Sarazine, and Grabinier's reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel R. Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press, which helped win Delany a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. This edition includes the author's corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney."The American Shore is an important offering in the history of science fiction criticism, rich with Delany's poetic skills and insight as a tremendous, formidable reader. It is a one of a kind book, really, and very clearly attempts a genre of its own." --Louis Chude-Sokei, University of Washington"Delany's dive over and between the lines of "Angouleme" stands as a model of thought about all the signs and languages that produce and obscure our lives. No great text ever ends if there are still readers to read it and reread it, to diffuse it and re-fuse it, reveling in the possibilities of polysemy and dissemination." --Matthew Cheney, from the introduction

Genres: Criticism, Science Fiction

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Reviews

[W.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delany wrote The American Shore as he was absorbing the concepts and techniques of Structuralism (incl. its various Post- and De- derivatives)in the mid-1970s. Delany subjects Thomas Disch's short story "Angouleme" to a line-by-line analysis, drawing out literary connections, linguistic webbing, social implications, and much more---some of which, in the grand Structuralist Analysis tradition, Disch almost certainly did not intend. This reading is not cumulative---that is, it does not build to a tidy summation but remains granular, though not centerless: at the center is Delany's then high degree of interest in the philosophy/deliniation of science fiction as a genre. (His later thoughts on this subject are rather different.) As my long-time great enthusiasm for Delany's work has from the beginning been based in the fact of his great strengths as a thinker---not as any kind of stylist or storyteller---this book remains fascinating, however many of its ideas may have been supplanted by his later ones. Here Delany's formal decision to go through the entire text of Disch's story (not a particularly inspired piece of writing,though Delany seems to have found it so) in as-written order forces him at times to struggle with his own structure---some lines are not very fertile, idea-wise---and at other times he only lightly touches on Disch's text while responding with brilliant, tangential flights of thought. (An oxbow of an exposition on the uses of dashes---as in em dash---is a good example of this.) The primary rewards of this book come not just from the ideas Delany offers but in watching his mind at work. There is a short biographical note at the back, detailing the relationship of the two authors to that point (a realtionship which, decades later, was to end badly), but The American Shore is almost entirely a dense intellectual exercise---and fascinating for it.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's an expression in comedy that says examining humor is like dissecting a frog. You might understand the frog better but it dies in the process and the guts are deeply unappealing to the average person.

Delany's style of criticism is that of the Barthes school and I must say I don't care for it at all. Listening to formalists talk about a piece of writing almost always makes my brain cry out for self-destruction and this was no different even if Delany is talking about a piece of writing that I adore and advocating for the legitimacy of Science Fiction as a complex artform and medium worthy of intense study as with any piece of literature (the good stuff, anyway).

But it would never even occur to me to approach a piece like this not because I haven't been trained to think in terms of signifiers and signified, of inward and outward discourses, and of semantic relations. This is something that only people of Delany's insular and frankly overeducated background are interested in. These reindeer games completely miss what art is about.

This represents a brand of literary criticism that I find wholly unbeautiful and I reject the idea that it really explains much of anything. Criticism and essay writing is itself and art and attempting to turn it into a science here as Delany does is not without virtue but it's borderline unreadable and in 200 pages about a 20 page short story, he somehow fails to capture the essence of what makes the story good. Delany's notes feel at times like personal notetaking designed to make sense only for the author, footholds to flesh out later. He may have strung up wires and lights between different themes and rhetorical tricks Disch placed into this story but Delany fails to give them power and turn 'Angouleme' into a beacon for SF's legitimacy as was surely Delany's goal. He fails (and might not even be interested) in instructing the reader on why they should care, to ride the wave of enthusiasm and brilliance generated by the original text by enhancing and validating it. Here Delany plays an insular game, babbling to himself and surely he is very intelligent-- an absolute polymath. But I struggle to see how this is a useful, worthwhile exercise to anyone other than trying to convince someone from the Barthes school who thinks SF is all Flash Gordon stories into thinking there's more meat on the bone.

This, honestly, is my theory. Delany was born in and molded by a very formalist and elite literary establishment yet was drawn to the maligned and underestimated field of SF. The American Shore is his attempt to validate this story (and the medium in general) only in the eyes of other members of his cloister. I can't help but feel like Delany plays into the establishment that loathes SF a bit by doing this-- advocating for SF's value because it passes silly tests invented by a misguided sect of academia that doesn't understand why we dissect frogs in the first place.

I have two other books of criticism by Delany (Jewel Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine). As far as I know, they don't read like this. If I'm wrong it will be a major disappointment.