Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir
Marleen S. Barr
About the Author
Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the science fiction issue of PMLA. She is the author of the humorous campus novel Oy Pioneer!
Joyce Carol Oates defines “the bibliomemoir” as “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography… [It] represents a risky appropriation of an exalted subject, and . . . fearlessly casts the memoirist’s shadow over the text.” With this juxtaposition in mind, I describe my forays into fiction as SF/memoir. I combine science fiction with the facts of my life. I take risks. I appropriate alleged subliterary (and definitely not “exalted”) science fiction genre tropes and bravely combine them with my reality. This combination results in a newness: an imaginary shadow text version of my real life.
*Oates, Joyce Carol. “Deep Reader.” The New York Times Book Review. January 26, 2014, 1, 22-23.
ISBN 978-0-9892018-6-5
250 pages
$18.95
5.5"x8.5" perfect bound, paper
Reviews
“Marleen S. Barr's last *Oy*--(OY PIONEER!: A Novel)--took me on a rollicking tour of a female academic's search for a husband to placate her Jewish mother. Her new *Oy* plunges readers into her very own academic specialty, feminist science fiction. But the search goes on. And with it, hilarious Jewish jokes, academic twists, sex--lots of sex--and, finally, a husband! Barr is an effervescent humorous writer who travels to South Africa, Austria, England, the West, Quebec, and 9/11 New York aboard a flamboyant imagination and real inside dope on the world of intellectuals. Join her. You'll love the ride!"
—Norman N. Holland, Marston-Milbauer, Eminent Scholar Emeritus, University of Florida
"Marleen S. Barr (or Sondra, the confusion is part of the novel's charm!) takes you on another crazy narrative ride in this sequel to OY PIONEER!. Tighten your seat belts!"
—James Gunn, Recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy
"Barr mentions Twain here immediately. But I read her equally in the long tradition of Swift and George Eliot. She produces both criticism and fiction massively with a “savage indignation.” Marleen S.Barr is determined that her voice be heard, and we should listen."
—D.M. Hassler, Professor of English, Kent State University and former Editor, EXTRAPOLATION
"From Huckleberry Finn (whose famous opening Marleen Barr echoes in her own latest novel) to such modern classics as Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and A Confederacy of Dunces, the comic novel has long been one of the chief glories of American literature. Barr's novels, and not least her most recent one, constitute a hilarious--and unswervingly feminist--contribution to this great tradition."
—Carl Freedman, Russell B. Long Professor of English, Louisiana State University