James Johnson

April 30, 2002 

Studying the Literature of Space and Exploration as an Aerospace Engineer

         As an engineering student I was never exposed to the study of literature.  All of my life I have always loved reading books.  As a youth my reading was typically a bipolar activity.  I was either reading for the purpose of entertainment or reading to learn about a subject.  As an adult my habit has been to try to select books to read that would both entertain and educate me in a subject I was interested in.  The depth of my appreciation for what I read was at least consciously limited to the book’s entertainment value and the knowledge I felt I had gained about the subject matter.  The perceived knowledge of the author was always an important factor.  An example of this would be Dragonfly by Bryan Burrough.  The book was entertaining to read and was also very informative about NASA’s involvement with the Russian space station Mir.

         Studying the Literature of Space and Exploration as a part of this class has opened up a whole new world of things to consider as a part of my future reading.  I may have had some awareness of things such as genre issues, gender issues, cultural issues, period issues, psychological issues, etc. on a subconscious level but I certainly never engaged in any conscious thoughts about the relationship of any of these issues to the books I was reading.   In terms of genre issues, in the future I will always now be consciously aware of the author’s use of journal, diary, or scientific report formats to impart the feel of authenticity to his work.  It will also be interesting to analyze the mix of narrative and technical detail and the techniques the authors use to transition from one to the other.  I suspect the use of Gothic themes will also be readily apparent to me in my future readings. 

         Period effects will also be very interesting to me.  When I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels as a youth, his views on character issues such as honor, duty, chivalry etc. were very apparent and those views were consistent throughout all of his works that I read.  I had no awareness that these were early twentieth century period issues.  When I read the works on Antarctic exploration I saw some of those same character values driving the men in the Antarctic through incredible hardships in order to survive.  The appearance of these same values in such widely differing works really brought home the meaning of period issues to me and provided for some interesting reflection on my previous readings of Burroughs.

         Another area I will be aware of in my future readings will be gender issues.  Gender issues are especially interesting in the Literature of Space and Exploration because it is normally a male-dominated subject area.  The female authors in our class readings tended to write more about psychological, social and cultural issues rather than technical or conquest type themes.  In the future it will always be interesting to see how consistent this tendency is when I read additional works by female authors.

         Another item that was very interesting to me was Craig Sprowl’s presentation on the MacLaren article.  This piece articulated what I had already noticed while reading our assignments on Arctic and Antarctic exploration.  The diaries and journals were so graphic and detailed that the reader could not help but believe them.  As we got into writings by other authors that had written about polar exploration, but had not experienced polar exploration first hand, their work was usually more entertaining but less convincing to me.  This also illustrated why Poe and other authors resorted to the journal and reference genres to make their work more believable at the cost of making them less readable.  As in most things striking the right balance for your planned audience is the key.

         Knowing a little more about literature should make my future reading more enjoyable but if all of the new literary aspects I have learned about start to take away some of the fun, I will still be able to go back and read one of Burroughs’ books and enjoy the adventurous ego trip for what it is, without any other intellectual expectations or burdens.