Cover image of Volume 35 Issue Number 2 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
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JFA 35.2 – Table of Contents
Latinx Young Adult Fantasy as Guides through Portals: A Potential Framework for Portals as Sites for Agency and Identity
Jordan Alves-Foss
Time Travel as the Displacement of the Fantastic: The Shifting Temporal Paradigms of Genre and Narratology in the Outlander Television Drama
Michael Unger
The Ekphrastic Narrative of the Silmarils: The Prevalence of Ekphrasis in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion
Patrícia Sá
Creative Think Piece: A Gift From Pegasus
Jean Lorrah
David G. Hartwell Award Winner, 2024
“The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable”: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic
Liz Busby
David G. Hartwell Award Winner, 2024
Toxic Tales: The Craft of Enchantment in Fiction and Memoir
Sasha Bailyn
Walter James Miller Memorial Award Winner, 2024
Resurrecting Indigenous Sciences from the Prehistoric Myths of Chinese Ancestral Tribes: The Whimsical Cosmographer in Weiyu’s Great Fable Tetralogy
Yuheng Ko
Analyzing Works Of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Octavia E. Butler As Prophetic Literature In American Society
Stevens Orozco
Map Before Territory: Cartography and Ecology in Erik Granström’s Svavelvinter
Svante Landgraf
REVIEWS
Anastasio, Matteo, Margot Brink, Lisa Dauth, Andrew Erickson, Isabelle Leitloff, and Jan Rhein’s (eds.) Transnationale Literaturen und Literaturtransfer im 20. und 21. Jarhrhundert: Plurilinguale und interdisziplinare Perspektiven
Rev. by Alexis Brooks de Vita
Kimberly Cleveland’s Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds
Rev. by Olawale Oladokun
Antonio Córdoba and Emily A. Maguire’s Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction
Rev. by Cailey Poirier
Abstracts
Jordan Alves-Foss
This essay proposes a new overarching framework, portals as sites for agency and identity, for analyzing portals within fantasy as a potential way to analyze a character’s agency and identity. Under this larger framework, this essay proposes five different types of portals: Exploration, Intrusion, Agency/Transformation, Destruction, and the Portal not Traveled. By looking at how characters move across these different portals and how these portals are presented, readers and theorists can analyze characters’ levels of agency and the shaping of their identity. This analysis can reveal larger implications of what identities are protected, valued or sacrificed, and thus reveal more extensive commentaries about the world at large. Finally, this essay puts forth an argument that Latinx Critical Theory should be included in future fantasy work, as it provides a powerful analysis into what it means to be a person trapped between two worlds. While the case is made for all fantasy works, examples are specifically made with Zoraida Córdova’s Labyrinth Lost, Aiden Thomas’s The Sunbearer Trials, and, briefly, Louis Sachar’s Holes.
Michael Unger
The critically acclaimed television drama Outlander (Starz: 2014-present) in its first two seasons challenged the ontological flexibility and narrative pleasures of time travel by presenting it initially as an earthbound fantasy in Season 1 and then as an explicated facet of a science fiction rationality in Season 2. This essay examines how the first two seasons of Outlander constitute what I term “the displacement of the fantastic”: an ongoing structural segue of what Tzvetan Todorov categorizes as a literary construct of the fantastic marvelous in which a narrative’s protagonist, and by extension the reader, move from the fantastic as a duration of uncertainty in the narrative to the marvelous, in which the supernatural entity or phenomenon is accepted and explained. The displacement of the fantastic thus allows for the viewer to experience two time-travel pleasures and premises: the fantasy of the paradoxical time loop where causality is void and the standing stones operate as a temporal glitch in Outlander’s first season, and then as a science fiction theorization of the multiverse in Season 2. The formation of chronology of the closed causal time loop in Season 1 transforms into multiple timelines that contain different narrative paradoxes, making the narrative of Claire’s relationships across time and history itself become more complex through fantastical portals. As Claire tries to correct the wrongs of her past and history writ large, the narrative of time travel appeals to the viewer’s fantasy to go back in time, addressing thematic issues of time and memory and historical revisionism, engaging the viewer by raising questions about his/her own experiences. How does the past influence the present? Can one correct the wrongs of the past?
The current understanding of ekphrasis is of a verbal recreation of a visual representation and is quite different from ekphrasis as it was understood in Classical Antiquity, when it pertained to imaginary objects, people, places, time periods, and events. Ancient ekphrasis is description animated by narrative, to make a subject stand out as crucial. As Page duBois claims in her 1982 study History, Rhetorical Description, and the Epic: From Homer to Spenser, ekphrasis operates as a significant turning point in the epic, the mark of a change in the narrative. Examples similar to its ancient use can still be found in the present day. This paper investigates the uses of ekphrasis in Tolkien’s fantasy world in the The Silmarillion, demonstrating that the descriptions of the Silmarils are not merely ornamental but crucial to the overall narrative, and are thus examples of ancient ekphrasis. It is not simply description of a decorative object, a fragment of the text; ekphrasis speaks of how the object looks, how it comes to be, and what sort of feelings it inspires, thereby creating a vivid representation in the reader’s imagination. Tolkien creates vivid images of the Silmarils so that they feel like living things. Their imaginary quality allows for an infinite number of representations, as each reader is thus able to invent their own Silmarils. Readers may be moved by the characters who lust for the Silmarils because they know that an inevitable, tragic destiny shadows them. On the other hand, characters who handle the Silmarils with noble purpose revive the reader’s hope in the triumph of good over evil, Tolkien’s eucatastrophe. This evokes Ruth Webb’s assertion that ekphrasis, in its ancient understanding, hinges on its impact on an audience (“Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern” 12). Thus, readers become a part of the literary process. With the exploration of these ideas, I add to the conversation regarding the ancient use of ekphrasis in Tolkien’s fiction and lend weight to the argument that despite its distance in time, ekphrasis in its primordial understanding still has a place in contemporary texts, not only in poetry, but narrative fiction as well, and would therefore benefit from further discussion.
Liz Busby
David G. Hartwell Award Winner, 2024
“The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable”: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic
When Susanna Clarke wrote her novel Piranesi, she could not have predicted that it would be published during a global pandemic. The book’s narrative of being trapped alone in an infinite interior space resonates with the enforced social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Piranesi copes with his isolation through his study of the symbolic statues that line the halls of the House: their stories become a lifeline, enabling his survival in otherwise insufferable circumstances. Perhaps one of the most unique things about reading Piranesi during the pandemic is its reframing of a quiet life confined to an interior space as tranquil and beautiful rather than constricting and claustrophobic. This perspective on abiding in a work of art echoes a formalist appreciation of story: story doesn’t need to mean anything or have any practical application in the world to be valuable.
Sasha Bailyn
David G. Hartwell Award Winner, 2024
Toxic Tales: The Craft of Enchantment in Fiction and Memoir
Enchantment is not a genre in and of itself, falling somewhere between speculative and magical realism. It’s a craft approach that takes the reader out of a linear, logical experience of reality, while highlighting and exploring the complexities of life. What distinguishes enchanted storytelling is its form, which references or directly imitates classic European fairy tales. Enchantment is a perspective, a slanted look at reality. It asks readers to let go of expectations and whisks them out of the ordinary, away from linear, logical lives. But to be convincing, enchantment must occur in the day-to-day, with a sense of depth and purpose—reflection, as opposed to pure escape. This is not a study of enchantment as genre, but as craft device: what are its uses in prose, and how is it deployed in both fiction and creative nonfiction? This essay explores how Gingerbread, a fairy tale rewrite novel by Helen Oyeyemi, and the fairy tale-like memoir In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, are alike or different in their enchanted prose.
Yuheng Ko
Walter James Miller Memorial Award Winner, 2024
Resurrecting Indigenous Sciences from the Prehistoric Myths of Chinese Ancestral Tribes: The Whimsical Cosmographer in Weiyu’s Great Fable Tetralogy
This article proposes to read the speculative aesthetics of Weiyu’s Great Fable tetralogy as an example of indigenous Chinese science fiction based on its appropriation of the motif of cosmographical collection from Chinese zhiguai, or strange tales, and its rationalization of Chinese origin mythology and folklore through a whimsical rhetoric that appeals to modern scientific discourse while simultaneously questioning its epistemological foundation. This reading of Indigenous Chinese science fiction underscores the close ties between internet literature, science fiction, and the modernity discourse of the Chinese literary establishment since May Fourth, particularly in relation to key issues such as vernacular language, anti-orthodox innovation, and critical reflection on scientific reasoning. Through an analysis of the central whimsical figure, the shen-gun or godly trickster, I will demonstrate how Weiyu develops a distinctive strategy of mythological rationalization—one that both inherits and subverts the approach of her May Fourth predecessors, shaped by the emergent whimsical paradigm in internet literature.
Stevens Orozco
In exploring the connections between the literary arts and the history of society, this study points to the existence of a prophetic element within the proposed formula by French historian Hippolyte Taine when analyzing works of African American writers James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Octavia E. Butler. By tracing the history of society through a linear path of published and canonized works, this essay argues in support of Taine’s theory that the molding of society throughout history is a result of the manipulation of identities and narratives that have established the foundation for the historically dominant culture in a multicultural society in literature, philosophy, and government. The importance of the human element of the writer cannot be overstated for this formula to be successful. It is the writer who lives the shared experiences of the society they inhabit. The sense of identity of the writer depends on the systemic beliefs of their homeland in regards to race, ethnicity, and faith. These systemic beliefs shape the social conditions, the political environment, and the power dynamics that exist between the social classes of people. The tension of the social climate is influenced by how these sub-elements interact with and react to one another. The success of Taine’s formula relies upon the passage of time and technological advancement for writers to develop a sharper literary lens for predicting future trends and civilizations. Historical narratives expose the society’s victims and resistors within the margins of its neglected storylines. This has led to moments in which the morality of a nation is confronted and the threat of a collapse looms larger as the balance between social classes becomes overburdened by greed, selfishness, and hatred. Taine did not live long enough to witness the possibilities for massive data collection and historical documentation created by the information age. In response to this new potential for narrative manipulation, this essay demonstrates that the twentieth-century works of Baldwin, Morrison, and Butler have executed a practice of radical imagination that succeeds in reclaiming their community’s identity, narrative, and history. Mirroring the years leading to the Civil War, as well as the years leading to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, this current moment has been constructed by the same oppositional forces and narratives that have plagued the nation since its founding. Whether analyzing through the Hegelian historical cycles or the prophetic writings of Baldwin, Morrison, and Butler, this moment had been foreseen and has arrived. This practice of radical imagination produces a forward vision consciousness that transparently addresses the status of postcolonial society and proposes attitudes and approaches to confront obstacles that still lie ahead.
Svante Landgraf
Map Before Territory: Cartography and Ecology in Erik Granström’s Svavelvinter
This article analyzes the maps in the Svavelvinter series of novels and role-playing games by Swedish author Erik Granström. The maps activate readers, turning them into players of the game. These cases are examples of how the fantastic is intimately tied to a transgression of material boundaries: between reader and textworld, between map and territory, and between narrative levels in the text. This essay studies how different maps are represented in texts, how the reader is activated in different ways so that the distinction between text and game becomes blurred, and how the fantastic allows for a convergence of metaphor, theme and form. I further highlight the transgression of material boundaries in the fantastic aesthetic object: between reader and textworld as the reader interprets maps in the book, between map and textworld territory as the map can magically affect the space it depicts, and between narrative levels in the text by metafictional leaps. This convergence is accomplished by employing tools and strategies connected to the field of general ecology, encompassing themes such as the dissolution of boundaries between human and nonhuman actors, between living and nonliving matter, between nature and culture, and decentralizing the place of humanity in the world. The fantastic mode affords specific methods for blurring form and content, for example, when the map occurs as metaphor, theme and form. This hybrid nature of the fantastic aesthetic object reveals ecological themes in the texts and contributes to making the reader a co-creator of the aesthetic experience. This transgressive property of the fantastic shows the importance of studying that form of literature in this age of increasing ecologization of space, of reconfigurations and renegotiations: migration and globalization simultaneously transcend and highlight issues of physical borders and of places blending into each other; technological developments in augmented reality and online communications blur the lines between virtual and actual space; the concept of the Anthropocene highlights how humanity is reshaping the physical world. In the fantastic, these aspects of the world are made especially visible; the metaphors can take on literal meanings, bringing light to how nature and technology, science and culture, human and non-human interact and intertwine.