Here are some belated responses to your specfic postings,
Piyush, organized according to their appearances.

#1 (Sept. 1)  Genre's (re)definitions
    I suspect that James and Rose would want to say they're
    more than 'hinting' at the connections and tensions
    twixt commodification and labelling of SF; but they're
    also not much concerned, I think, with the sort of
    'purity' that Derrida suggests--what's the 'telos' he
    refers to, and why assume that there is one such for
    James/Rose??

    You're right, of course, that commodity labelling
    creates market, and James does want to argue that--for
    a time and in some places--the very existence of that
    market caused some reactionary academics to discount SF
    as serious lit.  But these generalities must be
    contextualized carefully: the ghettoization James
    refers to is in large part a past phenom in the US and
    UK academic communities.  To a significant degree, this
    change is part of a larger shift toward 'serious' study
    of all popular culture.  In another view, this amounts
    to the academic cooptation of a popular form.  Either
    way, in many academias, SF is 'ours'.

    [One thing you might do in writing these postings is
    include references to the theorists you're citing--lots
    of your audience would enjoy the chance to look up
    Brennan, Bakhtin, etc.,.  It would also be helpful--I
    know this is hard w/a busy schedule--if you could slow
    down a bit and 'unpack' some of the key ideas and
    phrases you're adapting.  For instance, 'Bakhtinian
    thesis of chronotopia' will be virtually meaningless to
    most people in this little community...:->]

    I'm fascinated by the contrast twixt Novel and Epic;
    but which ones?  When?  Where?  How do you know that
    the Epic didn't, for centuries at least, provide a
    sense of contemporary community--if not of 'nations'
    then of 'tribes'??

    Hmmmm.  SF "challenges the realist ideal of
    'synchrony'"--and that would be what?  Here's another
    of those places where further development would help. 
    I suspect you're thinking of realist narrative's purported
    temporal sameness with that of the reader; but if so,
    then how does this work when we read 19th-century
    novels?  Where's the 'synchrony' then?

    Still, you do point to an interesting possibility,
    which I might rephrase as "unlike realist fiction which
    constrains itself to an imagined identity between the
    fictive world and the reader's 'real' world
    (contemporary or historical), SF promotes a visionary,
    speculative relation between these worlds."   Is that
    close?

    I like your contrasting development of
    epic/romance/realist fictions vs. SF, but again they're
    awfully general.  Wouldn't it be fairer to say that
    _some_ SF eschews these narrative voices....or even
    better, a la Bakhtin, that these voices are
    resynthesized into freshly dialogical forms?

    Thanks for offering the copies; keep doing so; but give
    the citations, too...:)

#2 (Sep 18)  Judgings Not; Gendrifications; Gender
    Neutralizings...[and howsabout giving us some
    parag breaks in your specs, eh ?]

    First, let's again have a bit more context: you might
    have tipped us off as to a) which Intro to "That only a
    mother" you were reading; b) where this "gender
    neutrality" seems specifically to arise (don't be shy
    about nailing the prof, if that's where you're hearing
    this...; it's important to get these issues into the
    discourse).  
     
    Next: excellent questions about represented alienation,
    'absurd' and 'monster'....but do you really mean to say
    that Mary Shelley is the Mom of all monsters?  What
    about Grendl, the Kraken, or such monstrous figures in
    the Upanishads?

    Yes, it's much more useful to conceive of the
    'creature' as 'woman' in the represented social world
    of Shelley's novel....but doesn't that derive as much
    from Romanticist ideology as it does from Mary's tragic
    girlhood?

    Whoa!  "the subsequent male take on the concept of
    monster . . ." Waaay to general, young maestro!  Which
    males?  Which monsters?? When?  Where??  What about the
    monsters written by females....say....Anne Radcliffe??

    Too, the attack on Sargent is ironic, considering all her
    work to challenge the patriarchy in SF with the 'Women
    of ...' collections as well as her own novels.  These
    are real issues, and there were/are editors who failed
    to grasp 'em; but I have the strong feeling that you're
    firing howitzers at gnats here: find a more substantial
    target!  ;->

    Next, to your response to Tiffany--good detailing here,
    but (again) take a little more time to unpack your
    theoretical references (your audience generally doesn't
    know Cixous, Lacan, or the ways you're specifically
    using 'signifier' 'psychoanalytic' and 'closure').  

    Last, chew through the interesting hierarchies in your
    response here: how meaningful is it to argue that
    nuclear holocaust is _less_ threatening than
    patriarchal suffocation??  Why is there 'a perfect
    amount of modesty' in Tiffany's response?

#3 (Sep 29) The Weapons Shop...

    Please to unpack further(!) such wonders as "the
    crucial speculative or fantastic part in it has more to
    do with the 'ficitonal' 'promise' of technocratic
    timeless futurity (instead of history) that it has to
    offer"....wowser, yeah, but in unpacking you might have
    helped us to grok a) why 'crucial'? b) why quote
    fictional and promise? c) why 'timeless'? d) why is
    that timelessness opposed to history? e) why all of
    this is obvious and why you're interested in something
    much less so...??

    Yes, it's useful to conceive of the story beyond its
    own claimed closures--isn't your exploration of its
    folds akin to Huntington's?  How/why so/not?

    A good start on unpacking your thinking here, which is
    very rich and intriguing.  But "characters as fluid
    principles behind a broad networking of the
    possibilities of negotiation in the context of larger
    paradigmatic shifts as sensed by the author in that
    instant when the reader happened to realize the text as
    well as the author" strikes me as a rather overloaded
    sentence that still wants some refinement and
    clarification--perhaps into a couple sentences,
    certainly in order to clarify the last couple lines. 
    Or, if characters are "fluid principles," in what sense
    are they "behind" this network of negotiative
    possibilities??  Are these principles foundational to
    the network, causally or logically antecedent, or just
    beforehand temporally?  And what (in the wide world of
    sports) does "larger paradigmatic shifts" refer to?
    Such as what?  And do you mean to say that the writer
    senses these in the same instant that the reader does?
    Or, what does "realize the text" convey here???
    That is: help us out, Piyush!

    For instance, you could have spent several parags just
    deploying the binary flat/round, citing Forster, and
    generally translating "recursive, 'innate/d'
    polyphony"....no??

    Then, some good thinking in the following reading of
    WS, but the vague refs to what VanVogt might have known
    in 1942 (esp. vis a vis the purported later
    'developments' which sound suspiciously like
    teleological thinking about technopolitical 'advances'
    in the various systems) need some careful grounding and
    specification--not only in the historical details, but
    also the biographical ones...

    I'm glad you gesture toward the diffs you feel twixt
    cultural and political theories, but there's not enough
    here for us quite to figure out why you raised the
    issue in the first place...("more please").

    Okay, now your larger term project is clearer in
    outline; but be careful to substantiate and detail your
    larger historical and paradigmatic claims to avoid
    flashy generalities.  Try to limit these claims
    carefully as well, eh?  How does VV's being Canadian
    affect your analysis, for instance?? 

    You'll also need to consult the array of secondary
    materials on Van Vogt etc., and you should also be
    reading Darko Suvin, METAMORPHOSES OF SCIENCE FICTION,
    and Frederic Jameson on SF for parallel theorizings. 
    There's also a nice historical commentary by Griffiths
    called THREE TOMORROWS: AMERICAN, BRITISH, AND SOVIET
    SCIENCE FICTION.

    You'd also want to be very careful to map out the
    historical differences and continuities between VV's
    capitalist ideologies of 1942 and the much later
    emergence of 'post-industrial' multinational capitalism
    in his/our world.

    As for alternate texts, you might hunt up some of the
    east european and Russian SF that exists, starting with
    Lem's work, but including, for instance, Zamiatin's WE;
    Capek's; the Strugaksky brothers' (Arkady and Boris);
    etc.  Here are some gleanings from net databases,
    too....