{"id":1869,"date":"2021-12-17T11:50:27","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T18:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/?page_id=1869"},"modified":"2021-12-17T11:50:27","modified_gmt":"2021-12-17T18:50:27","slug":"jfa-31-3-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/jfa-31-3-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"JFA 31.3 (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction: New Perspectives on Fantasy<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Brian Attebery<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our peerless reviews editor Jeffrey Weinstock recently forwarded to me a query from his students: Why doesn\u2019t fantasy have the same critical\/theoretical tradition as science fiction? I have several possible answers. One is the lack of a venue. Until this journal was established as an outgrowth of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, there was no outlet for critical essays devoted specifically to the fantastic. We\u2019ve been around a while now, considering that this is volume 31, issue 3, but that is quite a bit younger than journals such as Extrapolation<\/em> and Science Fiction Studies<\/em>. We\u2019ve done a lot, but we\u2019re still playing catch-up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More problematically, there has been no academic book series devoted to fantasy\u2014until now. I am delighted to announce the establishment of such a series, called Perspectives on Fantasy, from Bloomsbury Academic Press. The series editors are Matthew Sangster, Dimitra Fimi, and me, and the planning for it took place during my half year as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, under the care and feeding of Dr. Robert Maslen. Here is a description from the Series call for proposals: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by fantasy\u2019s deep cultural roots, powerful aesthetic potential, and reach across a broad range of media \u2014from literature, film and television to art, animation and gaming\u2014Perspectives on Fantasy provides a forum for theorising and historicising fantasy via rigorous and original critical and theoretical approaches. Works in the series will cover major creators, significant works, key modes and forms, histories and traditions, the genre\u2019s particular affordances, and the ways in which fantasy\u2019s resources have been drawn on, expanded and reconfigured by authors, readers, viewers, directors, designers, players, and artists. With a deliberately broad scope, the series aims to publish dynamic studies that embrace fantasy as a global, diverse, and inclusive phenomenon while also addressing oversights and exclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We launch this year with Taylor Driggers\u2019s study of Faith and Fantasy: Queering Theology in Fantastic Texts<\/em>, with others in the pipeline. I hope these projects will help consolidate the efforts by many scholars around the world and give our favorite mode greater academic visibility and impetus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impetus part of that\u2014or lack of\u2014is related to an additional factor, which is the resistance of fantasy to the kind of analysis that falls under the heading of \u201ctheory\u201d as that is usually understood. Cultural theory is a philosophical endeavor in a particular European tradition that looks back primarily to Marxist critique with an overlay of psychoanalysis. It offers a powerful set of analytical tools that has proven wonderfully applicable to science fiction. Indeed, Carl Freedman claims that science fiction is theory, or at least that \u201cthe conjunction of critical theory and science fiction is not fortuitous but fundamental\u201d (Critical Theory and Science Fiction<\/em>, Wesleyan UP, 2000, 23). The claim is plausible because of sf\u2019s forward-looking stance and its origins in satirical and utopian literatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other side, defenses of fantasy by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis\u2014incisive as they are\u2014can put a halt to materialist, historically grounded, and politically engaged readings of the genre. Tolkien\u2019s \u201crecovery\u201d is not seen as cognate with Brecht\u2019s defamiliarization; mythopoesis seems to be headed in the opposite direction from satire. People remember Tolkien\u2019s decrying of allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings<\/em> while forgetting that he allowed for applicability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Articles in this issue offer an assortment of approaches to fantasy\u2019s versions of cognition and politics without taking routes favored by theorists from the Birmingham, Frankfurt, or Vienna (i.e., psychoanalytic) schools of cultural critique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First up, Madison Noel Gehling explores The Wind in the Willows<\/em> as a response to social conflict as well as an invocation of the myth of Arcadia. Gehling proposes a dialectic of sorts that positions the River Bank against the Wide World. Each of the protagonists variously negotiates the contrary pulls of the two social spaces. Rat, Mole, and Toad must find ways to reconcile history and myth while maintaining ties to community and acknowledging change\u2014as do we all. In this regard, I recommend taking a look at Kij Johnson\u2019s respectful but revisionist take on Grahame\u2019s creation in The River Bank<\/em> (2017), in which, among other things, she introduces assertive female characters to The Wind in the Willows<\/em>\u2019s masculine utopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next, Joshua B. Tuttle proposes a new lens on the Weird subgenre of fantasy that he calls the Spooky. He positions the Spooky in relation to prior formulations such as Freud\u2019s Uncanny, Tzvetan Todorov\u2019s Fantastic, and Mark Fisher\u2019s Eerie, all of which begin with what seems to be a purely emotional or even physical response and move toward an analysis of the narrative structures that transform sensation into something more philosophical. Like Gehling, he looks carefully at narrative spaces, which in fantasy are almost always more than mere physical locations. \u201cThe Spooky,\u201d says Tuttle, \u201cdeals with the preparations or properties of a place or a narrative that function as signs of a possible encounter or threat, characterized by a growing sense of imminence. \u201dThe Spooky is all about an encounter that hasn\u2019t happened yet but that we feel must certainly happen: what will be, must be encountered is of a piece with the things we have lost in modernity. Says Tuttle, \u201cIf in a disenchanted world we are denied access to transcendence even as a fantasy, fundamentally, the Spooky allows us to read this possibility back into our experience of the world.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anca Rosu invites us to take a look at Patrick Rothfuss\u2019s popular TheKingkiller Chronicle as a negotiation between two cognitive systems, magic and science. It might seem as if the former were the only relevant paradigm, but Rosu takes us on a historical detour through older occult sciences andreturns to the present to find that the older magical ways of seeing the world have not disappeared from modern scientific language and thought. Rather, the practice of science (if not its idealized image) involves humans perceiving and interacting with the natural world in ways not as far removed from Hermetic magery as we might believe, especially when it comes to interpreting nature in terms of secrets and sympathies. Rothfuss brings out this similarity by backdating modern scientific terms and ideas, placing them in an otherwise convincing Renaissance world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hamish Williams focuses on one of the core modern fantasists, Tolkien, and his invention of a different sort of Arcadia from Grahame\u2019s. The island of N\u00famenor lies between Middle-earth and the Undying Lands that are Tolkien\u2019s version of paradise. It is usually read in mythic terms, a cross between Atlantis and Avalon, two other imagined islands west of Europe, with additional echoes of Hy-Brasil and the Hesperides. But Williams reminds us that Atlantis was fixed in the European imagination by Plato, and is of a piece with Plato\u2019s other social thought-experiment, the Republic. Additionally, Plato\u2019s mid-ocean utopia is \u201ccharacterized by a curious alternation between an idealized Western utopia and a corrupted Eastern kingdom.\u201d In other words, both Plato and Tolkien imagine the Occident in terms of a collectively imagined Orient, and the tensions that pull both societies apart are rooted partly in the mix of desire and repulsion with which European culture views lands to its east and south. N\u00famenor is both Golden Age past and dystopian future, and in both capacities, it links the world we currently inhabit with the ones we are bringing into being. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Matthew Sangster also looks at the intersection of myth and utopian thought in connection with the fantastic city-scapes of Tolkien, Calvino, Le Guin, Chesterton, and others. Considering cities as texts alongside their uses in texts, Sangster finds both intelligibility and ambiguity. Cities can be textually constructed as integral wholes or as conglomerations of warring fragments\u2014or both at the same time. Because both are truths about modern urban spaces, the symbolic capabilities of fantasy may be the best means of encompassing cities in our thought and imagination: of knowing them. Fantastic versions of the city, says Sangster, \u201cmake visible cities that were never there for others, and in doing so, they remake the meanings of their worlds.\u201d That may be one of the key functions of fantasy: to make visible what was previously hidden, an act that can be both cognitive and practical if we act on the visions that we have been given.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Articles<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Introduction: New Perspectives on Fantasy
Brian Attebery<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the River Bank: Toad’s Secret Arcadia in The Wind in the Willows <\/em>
Madison Noel Gehling<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dancing in the Ruins: Toward an Affect-Narratology of the Spooky
Joshua B. Tuttle<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magic\/Science in Patrick Rothfuss
Anca Rosu<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westwards, Utopia; Eastwards, Decline: The Reception of Classical Occidentalism and Orientalism in Tolkien’s Atlantic Paradise
Hamish Williams<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holism and Division in Dreams of the Metropolis
Matthew Sangster<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviews<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

John Newell\u2019s A Century of Weird Fiction: 1832\u20131937<\/em>
Rev. by Antonio Alcal\u00e1 Gonz\u00e1lez<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan Dinello\u2019s Constellations: Children of Men<\/em>
Rev. by Emrah Atasoy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.\u2019s The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaption<\/em>
Rev. by Barbara Braid<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anna MacFarlane, Lars Schmeink, and Graham Murphy\u2019s The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture<\/em>
Rev. by Simone Caroti<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sabrina Mittermeier and Mareike Spychala\u2019s Fighting for the Future: Essays on<\/em> Star Trek Discovery
Rev. by Cait Coker<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joseph W. Campbells\u2019s The Order and the Other: Young Adult Dystopian Literature and Science Fiction <\/em>
Rev. by Teresa Cutler-Broyles<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gwyneth Jones\u2019s Joanna Russ<\/em>
Rev. by Amandine Faucheux<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Cott\u2019s Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children\u2019s Literature<\/em>
Rev. by Dimitra Fimi<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann\u2019s Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach<\/em>
Rev. by Anya Heise-von der Lippe <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gerald Farca\u2019s Playing Dystopia: Nightmarish Worlds in Video Games and the Player\u2019s Aesthetic Response<\/em>
Rev. by Ashley P. Jones<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres\u2019s Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past
Rev. by Wesley Scott McMasters<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Parker\u2019s The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination<\/em>
Rev. by Annemarie M\u00f6nch<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anna Vaninskaya\u2019s Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien<\/em>
Rev. by R. J. Murphy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clive Bloom\u2019s The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic<\/em>
Rev. by Leah Richards<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Adam\u2019s Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality<\/em>
Rev. by Shannon Scott<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emily Lauer and Balaka Basu\u2019s The Harry Potter Generation: Essays on Growing Up with the Series<\/em>
Rev. by Megan Suttie<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction: New Perspectives on Fantasy Brian Attebery Our peerless reviews editor Jeffrey Weinstock recently forwarded to me a query from his students: Why doesn\u2019t fantasy have the same critical\/theoretical tradition as science fiction? I have several possible answers. One is the lack of a venue. Until this journal was established as an outgrowth of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1869","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1870,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1869\/revisions\/1870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}