I don't know whether anyone else read Ender's Game with Starship Troopers this semester--or had read it before--but I just read this interesting post on the Feminist SF blog--I was actually linked to it from Paper Cuts--about Orson Scott Card's winning the Margaret A. Edwards Award, which, I also learned, is some sort of important lifetime achievement award for YA lit. The thrust of the post is that Card is a horrible bigot and shouldn't be touted as a credible voice for young people.
Here's a link to the post: http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=275. It has some quotations from essays and stuff that Card has written that are really awful and disgustingly homophobic. If you're interested.
Even better, I thought, was this comment:
"al Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 2:32 am
i knew he was a homophobe before i read ender’s game, but i still read it on someone’s recommendation. i thought it was pretty interesting that the bad guys were referred to as “buggers†and that it found it’s way to being a slur amongst the humans.
i mean, i know they were ‘bugs’. but there is no way osc didn’t know what buggery (and buggers) was."
I really can't fathom how I missed that one. The phrase is so clearly sexual. And there's loads of (occasionally naked) homoerotic boy-play in the Battle School. Most of it more or less innocuous, though, which is interesting, given Card's self-professed beliefs.
I don't know whether there's anything productive to be done with this in Starship Troopers--the word in Ender's Game is also clearly a reference to the bad guys in ST--but if anyone wants to take a shot at it, I'd be interested to see what we could come up with, readings-wise. We talked a lot about gendered readings of ST, but not so much about the potential for queer readings. Not sure how much potential there is, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
This is more a response to the blog that you linked to in your post than your post itself, so it may come off as somewhat tangential (and probably rant-like).
Why I Dislike New Criticism, Yet Find It Useful
I have been handed back essays with red lines everywhere, because I started sentences with "By writing this way, the author is...". I got into an argument with a professor because I said that gothic authors, among other things, probably wanted to elicit an unsettling response in the reader. Sadly, I've been guilty of stumbling over two major parts of New Criticism--the intentional, and affective fallacies, respectively (These two terms are on Wikipedia if you want a more in-depth and impartial description). To me, the notion that you can call anything ignoring the author's intents or reader's response "Criticism" falls somewhere paradoxical and ridiculous.
And yet, as I read and enjoy Ender's Game (one of my favorite books), I'm suddenly forced to accept these tenets of New Criticism because if I don't make the distinction between Ender's Game and Orson Scott Card (not one of my favorite people, for obvious reasons), and accept some link between the two, I'll start thinking of Ender's Game as a subtle means of sneakily forcing homophobic ideology into unsuspecting young readers' minds.
And, as we can see from the passionate responses further down at "gnaaaaaaaaugh...testicles", once you start linking the relationship between author and reader to the actual content of the work, criticism becomes a very complex and challenging exercise, and tends to get quite messy. I guess when I read, I implicitly go "New Critic", because I want to see the book strictly in and of itself, and yet once I start thinking about it during or after the fact, once I've been affected by it and I think I understand what the author was saying, it seems preposterous to continue to think of the book as some sort of of oasis of thought, separate from everything else in the world.
I guess my difficulty with this whole system is that I like Ender's Game more than A Handmaid's Tale, but agree more with Atwood than Card ideologically, and while I dislike New Criticism as a way of approaching literature, it does let me deal with this discontinuity very easily--by simply saying my two preferences aren't incompatible at all, because there's no relation between them.