Brian Attebery<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Last month I was surprised and delighted to receive a World Fantasy Award on behalf of the Journal. Here are the remarks I sent to editor Gordon Van Gelder to be read at the Award Ceremony:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve always thought that fans and academics are natural allies, but I never expected to have an academic journal considered for a World Fantasy Award. The nomination was in my name, but the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts is really a collective effort. Credit goes to the IAFA, which sponsors the Journal, to my editorial predecessors, and especially to the team of volunteer workers who have made the Journal into a meeting place for people who are deeply curious about the fantastic in all its forms\u2014what John Clute calls Fantastika. That includes not only the people on the masthead\u2014Associate Editors, Managing Editor Chrissie Mains, and my various Editorial Assistants over the years\u2014but every contributor, everyone who has heard an interesting paper at a conference and suggested to its author that JFA might be a place to publish it, everyone who has served as a peer reviewer, and everyone whose advice I have sought over the last sixteen years. My thanks on their behalf for this recognition from another group who shares our passion.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this issue of the Journal we look back at another award associated with our sponsoring organization. I asked Gary K. Wolfe, who has administered the William L. Crawford Award since its creation in 1985, to write a history of the Award and its amazingly significant run of winners. Gary was Guest Scholar at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 1998, and here he fills in as a sort of honorary guest for the Conference that didn\u2019t happen: the Covid-canceled 2020 meeting. Gary\u2019s essay, for which we also solicited introductory remarks from Conference Chair Emeritus Donald Morse, doubles as a history of the kind of fantasy that keeps many of us in the field: adventurous, unpredictable, and profoundly engaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has been the practice of this Journal since its founding to publish Guest of Honor speeches from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, along with exemplary papers by graduate students and international scholars (winners of the David G. Hartwell, Walter James Miller, and Jamie Bishop Awards), interviews with attending writers, and articles based on papers presented at the Conference. Because the 2020 Conference was canceled by a pandemic, we don\u2019t have a Conference-based issue to present. Instead, we have taken the opportunity to ask Associate Editors, Editorial Board members, and friends of the Journal to contemplate what might lie ahead in the study of fantasy and the fantastic. This symposium brings together their various summaries of the state of the field and their ponderings about what they expect, or hope, to see emerging on the pages of this Journal and other venues for scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Introduction: Awards and Prospects The Crawford Award and Contemporary Fantasy Symposium: The Future of Fantasy Studies Simulacral Worlds in Angela Carter\u2019s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman<\/em> and Pavao Pavli\u010di\u0107\u2019s Evening Act<\/em> The Value of Fantasy in the Monstrous: China Mi\u00e9ville and Kelly Link\u2019s Weird Integrations of Critique and Affirmation Between World and Narrative: Fictional Epigraphs and Critical World-Building Sam George and Bill Hughes\u2019s In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Children<\/em> Igno Cornils\u2019s Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries<\/em> James Arthur Anderson\u2019s Excavating Stephen King: A Darwinist Lydia Zeldenrust\u2019s The M\u00e9lusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts<\/em> William O. Gardner\u2019s The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction<\/em> Dawn Stobbart\u2019s Videogames and Horror: From Amnesia to Zombies, Run!<\/em> Emily Alder\u2019s Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Si\u00e8cle<\/em> Alexia Kannas\u2019s Giallo! Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema<\/em> Stacy Abbott and Lorna Jowett\u2019s Global TV Horror<\/em> Eddie Falvey, Joe Hickinbottom, and Jonathan Wroot\u2019s New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror<\/em> Mike Ashley\u2019s Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1981\u20131990<\/em> James Uden\u2019s Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740\u20131830<\/em> Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett\u2019s Terry Pratchett\u2019s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond<\/em> JFA 32.2 (2021) Introduction: Awards and Prospects Brian Attebery Last month I was surprised and delighted to receive a World Fantasy Award on behalf of the Journal. Here are the remarks I sent to editor Gordon Van Gelder to be read at the Award Ceremony: I\u2019ve always thought that fans and academics are natural allies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1906","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1906","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1910,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1906\/revisions\/1910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
We are also taking this opportunity to look ahead with the first-ever round-robin symposium on the future of studies of fantasy and the fantastic. That section of the issue has its own introduction, so I will say no more here except that readers will be pleased and intrigued at the directions our contributors see in store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The issue is rounded out with three articles that look both back and ahead. We lead off with Kristina Grgi\u0107\u2019s examination of one of the twentieth century\u2019s great fantasists, Angela Carter. Grgi\u0107 pairs Carter\u2019s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman<\/em> with a book less well-known to Anglophone readers, Evening Act<\/em>, by Croatian writer Pavao Pavli\u010di\u0107. Both writers exploited the capacity of the fantastic to interrogate our constructions of reality through metafictional play. As Postmodernism, as a literary movement and critical lens, begins to recede into the past, it is high time to start figuring out how to incorporate its insights and achievements into the post-postmodern present. The concerns of Postmodernism have not gone away: we are immersed in hyperreality, surrounded by simulacra. One take-away from Grgi\u0107\u2019s analysis is that we need works like these more than ever: what used to be Postmodern and experimental is now the water we swim in, the air we breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kelly Budruweit also pairs up classic writers, though of more recent vintage, and also uses theory of \u201cpost\u201dness. Looking at China Mi\u00e9ville and Kelly Link\u2019s gloriously disorienting fiction, often classed as examples of the New Weird, Budruweit applies a reading strategy that Rita Felski designates as \u201cpostcritical,\u201d meaning that the reader has been through the wringer of extreme (and Postmodern) skepticism and come out the other side with, as Budruweit says, \u201cmore trusting, affirmative modes of engagement.\u201d The monstrous beings that inhabit Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s Perdido Street Station<\/em> and those that Link\u2019s fiction presents in the guise of more ordinary entities such as boyfriends simultaneously attract and repel us. They ask us to engage with monsters as neighbors and loved ones: one might say, as the New Normal, which is the Old Weird. This engagement is both emotional and cognitive, which further link\u2019s Budruweit\u2019s analysis with Grgi\u0107\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, Audrey Taylor and Stefan Ekman take a look at a fantasy convention\u2014one common enough to have been skewered by Diana Wynne Jones in her\u00a0Tough Guide to Fantasyland<\/em>\u2014that simultaneously looks back to traditional wisdom and ahead to the challenges of a quest narrative. Taylor, author of a recent and much-needed book on Patricia McKillip, and Ekman, whose study of fantasy maps has become a critical standard, here investigate the meaning and function of \u201cworld-intrinsic epigraphs,\u201d meaning quotes whose reliability and antiquity are well-known to those inside a fantasy world but must be taken on faith by readers because the texts they quote from are imaginary. In realist fiction, epigraphs and maps would be classed under G\u00e9rard Genette\u2019s term \u201cparatext\u201d: things that surround the text and guide our response to it. In fantasy, both represent the start of our journey out of the known universe. They are part of the world-building and, according to Taylor and Ekman, part of a particular form of world-building that they describe as \u201ccritical.\u201d In such world-building, they say, \u201cthe fictional world is constructed as a composite, by relating the mainly sequential presentation of the world in text and images to a more holistic perspective.\u201d By doing so, \u201cThe world is also placed in a critical context of genre conventions and theoretical discourses.\u201d This puts such fabricated epigraphs into the same metafictional, reality-testing category as the monsters of Link and Mi\u00e9ville or the postmodern disruptions of Pavli\u010di\u0107 and Carter\u2014and that brings them out of the secondary world\u2019s past and into our futures as we read and ponder.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIntroduction to the Symposium: The Future of Fantasy Studies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I thought it was high time to initiate such a symposium for a number of reasons, including the loss of a year\u2019s Conference-based conversations and upcoming changes to the Journal masthead as I step down as Editor after sixteen years in the position. Another reason is a widespread sense that fantasy has not kept up with its sister genre science fiction with regard to theoretical exploration\u2014see, for instance, Patrick Moran\u2019s 2019 book The Canons of Fantasy: Lands of High Adventure<\/em>, in which he notes the time lag between the publication of Clute and Nicholls\u2019s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction<\/em> (1979, expanded and revised 1993) and Clute and Grant\u2019s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy<\/em> (1997), and explains that \u201cthe full emergence of fantasy as a genre took place later than science fiction\u201d and that the latter has been \u201cgenerally deemed more worthy of serious attention and proper academic treatment\u201d (10 n. 11). Finally, the symposium reflects an awareness that fantasy and related forms are undergoing vast and heartening changes. In particular, movements such as Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism have generated a host of wonderful, challenging fictions and brought in new audiences, while new technologies of storytelling have emerged to challenge the supremacy of print. We need ways to comprehend and appreciate this richness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For all these reasons, I put out a call for short essays discussing what contributors see as the most useful, promising, and interesting theoretical approaches or areas of investigation for fantasy and the literature of the fantastic, and proposing a direction where they would like to see the study of fantasy head next. The call explained that what we mean by theory is simply a mechanism for generating questions beyond the obvious. Since some of the invitees are creative writers, I also asked, \u201cIf you are a writer of fiction, what would you like scholars to pay attention to?\u201d As might be expected, each respondent took a different tack, depending on interests and expertise. My thanks to Farah Mendlesohn for doing the initial curating and editorial work on these pieces. Some are speculative, others descriptive, and still others deliberately provocative. Several take an interesting turn from scholarship to the nature and future of fantastic literature itself. We have left the statements pretty much as submitted to try to duplicate the sort of open-ended conversation that takes place at ICFA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we prepare this symposium for print, some of what the participants have predicted is already coming to pass. New lines of scholarly publications are being established, including the first monograph series devoted to fantasy studies, Bloomsbury Academic\u2019s line of Perspectives on Fantasy, with series editors Dimitra Fimi, Matthew Sangster, and me. Students are more interested than ever in exploring nonrealistic modes of narrative\u2014although a general retrenchment within academia and what seems to me to be a concerted attack on the humanities threaten to quash that enthusiasm. Perhaps this symposium will serve as a rallying cry in the fight for our field and its potential for pinpointing injustices, opening up conversations, and fostering greater understanding of ourselves through our stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\nArticles<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Brian Attebery<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary K. Wolfe<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cristina Bacchilega<\/em>, Alison Baker, Jalondra A. Davis, Andrea Hairston, Karen L. Hellekson, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, David Sandner, Taryne Jade Taylor, Derek J. Thiess, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock<\/em>, Dennis Wilson Wise<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kristina Grgi\u0107<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kelly Budruweit<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stefan Ekman and Audrey Isabel Taylor<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nReviews<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Antonio Alcala Gonzalez<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Rachel Cordasco<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hermeneutic Study of the Fiction<\/em>
Rev. by Nicole C. Dittmer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Melissa Ridley Elmes<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Peter Faziani<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Elliot Mason<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Timothy S. Murphy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Sabrina Negri<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Kendall R. Phillips<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Carol Senf<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Ishita Singh<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Elo\u00efse Sureau<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Caroline Webb<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"