“Introduction: Cultural Work”
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
One of the most useful tools for fantasy scholars seems at first to have little to do with the fantastic. It is the idea of cultural work, a phrase introduced in Jane Tompkins\u2019s revolutionary Sensational Designs<\/em> (1985). In this book, Tompkins invites us to look at literature\u2014she is focusing on classic American literature of the nineteenth century\u2014not in terms of what it is or even what it says<\/em> but rather what it does<\/em>. This shift in perspective allows us to set aside questions of form and meaning (which is surprisingly unstable and reader-dependent even in familiar texts like Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s \u201cYoung Goodman Brown\u201d) and look instead at performance, to think of a literary text as an action instead of an aesthetic object.<\/p>\n Why is this useful in looking at the fantastic in literature and other arts? Because it redefines the literary canon as something situated in history and therefore subject to political jockeying and changes in fashion. Tompkins looks at writers like Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe to see how literary reputations can be manipulated to advance particular agendas. We can\u2019t designate any particular work as great, she suggests, without qualifying: great for whom? Who exactly are the readers that most appreciate the work, how do they read it, and what do they bring to it? Modernist criteria such as irony and complexity require a particular privileged circumstance; those facing dire poverty or injustice tend to prefer directness and engagement.<\/p>\n Even the \u201ctest of time\u201d for classic literature becomes problematic when one looks at how texts actually function over time. The Hawthorne who became an American classic in the late nineteenth century barely resembles the one taught in the mid-twentieth. The former was a writer of sweetness and spirituality; his best-received works were sketches like \u201cLittle Annie\u2019s Ramble\u201d (11). The latter is the Hawthorne of moral ambiguity and psychological acuteness. The Stowe who was dismissed in the modernist era as a sentimental lightweight is nothing like the Stowe perceived by her contemporaries. To get at the importance of works like Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, Tompkins suggests that readers need to question their own assumptions about how fiction works:<\/p>\n Once in possession of the system of beliefs that undergirds the patterns of sentimental fiction, it is possible for modern readers to see how its tearful episodes and frequent violations of probability were invested with a structure of meanings that fixed these works, for nineteenth-century readers, not in the realm of fairy tale or escapist fantasy, but in the very bedrock of reality. (127)<\/p>\n I\u2019m not wild about the comparisons she makes here. Perhaps Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> is good not because it is unlike a fairy tale but because fairy tales too are fixed in \u201cthe very bedrock of reality.\u201d However, the larger point is that it is a mistake to dismiss an entire period or genre on the basis of some other era\u2019s taste.<\/p>\n Why is this useful for students of the fantastic? First, the literary canon has not served us well. Like women\u2019s literature, like socially activist literature such as Stowe\u2019s, like literature written for children or by outsider groups, fantasy has been largely ignored or demeaned by the literary establishment on grounds that are presented as aesthetic but are covertly political. Genres such as fantasy and science fiction are dismissed not because the writing is weak or the imagination inferior but because they do the wrong things. Code words like \u201cjuvenile,\u201d \u201ctime waster,\u201d or \u201ccult\u201d are all clues that the critic disapproves not of the text but of the work it performs.<\/p>\n Second, Tompkins\u2019s ideas can allow us to make distinctions within the fantastic. I want to be able to say that certain writers\u2014James Morrow, say, or Laurie Marks\u2014are more significant than others whose books sit next to theirs on bookstore shelves, who use exactly the same generic conventions and even offer comparable pleasures. The difference is in the cultural work their stories perform. The questions they ask are more unsettling; the symbols more complex. For me, in my circumstances, their work is great because I think the world needs to be unsettled in just those ways. Our symbols need to be made problematic. Too much of the fantasy I read lets us rest comfortably in our beliefs and absolves us of action.<\/p>\n A third use for Tompkins\u2019s approach is to identify continuities across generic lines. The great divide of fantasy and realism and the lesser boundaries between children\u2019s literature and adult; popular and elite art; and literary, dramatic, and visual modes of presentation can keep us from seeing analogies and affinities across the borders. A retold folktale, a graphic novel, and a poem by William Blake might have more in common than conventional wisdom (or the structure of English departments) would allow. In order to discover the common threads, someone must first be willing to ignore accepted categories and second be able to name the patterns that emerge. \u201cCultural work\u201d is a useful name, for starters.<\/p>\n No one in this issue uses the phrase or directly cites Tompkins, but all the writers here ask questions about the cultural implications of cross-generic connections or category-violating texts. Therese-M. Meyer examines Nick Bantock\u2019s best-selling series of epistolary graphic novels. The description alone indicates how difficult it is to pin down the nature of these books: art or fiction, puzzle or romance or utopian fantasy. Meyer suggests that part of their work is to \u201cilluminate\u201d the occult; i.e., both to illustrate and to annotate W. B. Yeats\u2019s visionary system. The link to Yeats also indicates boundary-crossing, as Meyer finds affinities between the canonical poet and the popular storyteller.<\/p>\n Another such pairing is Terry Pratchett and Shakespeare in Kristin Noone\u2019s \u201cShakespeare in Discworld.\u201d Shakespeare is the<\/em> canonical writer of the Western world\u2014and so can\u2019t possibly be a fantasy writer, except that he is. Noone looks at two Pratchett fantasies that interlock with Macbeth<\/em> and A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, respectively, and shows how the novels both illuminate the plays. The novels perform their own work and also redirect Shakespeare\u2019s texts, as I can testify from having taught Macbeth<\/em> and Wyrd Sisters<\/em> back to back (along with Eleanor Arnason\u2019s Ring of Swords<\/em>, which also examines the Scottish play\u2019s cultural work on gender and power).<\/p>\n Daniel Bautista\u2019s \u201cComic Book Realism\u201d crosses the literary\/popular boundary from the other direction. It examines a literary novel that engages with a popular form: the superhero comic. Junot D\u00edaz\u2019s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/em> is in itself minimally fantastic. Bautista asserts that D\u00edaz uses an offshoot of magical realism that he calls \u201ccomic book realism,\u201d a blend of popular cultural strands (including sf, fantasy, and graphic novel) with close observation; only such a blend can represent the full imaginative life of his young Dominican-American protagonist.<\/p>\n Tom O\u2019Connor looks at two texts that are even less overtly fantastic than D\u00edaz\u2019s novel but that similarly focus on the power of fantastic narratives to script our lives. O\u2019Connor applies Gilles Deleuze\u2019s theory of becoming-art to revise Freudian approaches to fantasy as a dysfunctional evasion of reality. In the films he explores, Gregg Araki\u2019s Mysterious Skin<\/em> and Asia Argento\u2019s The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things<\/em>, characters adapt fantastic scenarios such as zombie movies and alien abduction narratives as ways of coping with childhood trauma. O\u2019Connor\u2019s analysis, echoing writer and editor Terri Windling\u2019s discussions of fairy tales as a way of coping with abuse, might offer a way of accounting for the continuing power of fantastic narrative. In this case the psychoanalytic work of dream analysis can also be cultural work if personal coping mechanisms become public narratives capable of stimulating social change.<\/p>\n Orion Ussner Kidder stays mostly within a single generic category, the superhero comic, but makes distinctions within it by exploring different kinds of cultural work performed in different eras. His focus is on the most recent era, which succeeds periods generally called the Silver Age (the mid-1950s through 60s, marked by the rise of Marvel Comics and the reinvigoration of DC Comics heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman) and the Dark Age (mid-80s and 90s, characterized by increased violence and troubled heroes like Frank Miller\u2019s reimagined Batman). According to Kidder, we are now in the Revisionist Era, and titles such as Alan Moore\u2019s Supreme<\/em> and Warren Ellis\u2019s Planetary<\/em> use metafictional techniques to investigate and critique their genre forerunners and their relationship to history. Revisionist comics rehistoricize the genre; by so doing, they not only uncover some of its earlier effects but also do some pretty powerful cultural work of their own.<\/p>\n Work Cited<\/p>\n Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790\u20131860<\/em>. New York\/Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.<\/p>\n “Illuminating the Occult: W. B. Yeats in Nick Bantock\u2019s Griffin and Sabine Series” “Shakespeare in Discworld: Witches, Fantasy, and Desire” “Comic Book Realism: Form and Genre in Junot D\u00edaz\u2019s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/em>” “Trauma and Becoming-Art in Gregg Araki\u2019s Mysterious Skin<\/em> and Asia Argento\u2019s The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things<\/em>” “Useful Play: Historicization in Alan Moore\u2019s Supreme<\/em> and Warren Ellis\/John Cassaday\u2019s Planetary<\/em>” “Beautiful Genre” Ann Martin\u2019s Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism\u2019s Fairy Tales<\/em> William Gray\u2019s Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and R. L. Stevenson<\/em> Elizabeth Miller and Robert Eighteen-Bisang\u2019s Bram Stoker\u2019s Notes for<\/em> Dracula: A Facsimile Edition<\/em> John Drakakis and Dale Townshend\u2019s Gothic Shakespeares<\/em> S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz\u2019s Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia<\/em> Vincent Geoghegan\u2019s Utopianism and Marxism<\/em> Robin Mackay and Damian Veal\u2019s Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development IV<\/em> Fred Botting\u2019s Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic<\/em> Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint\u2019s The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction<\/em> Heather Masri\u2019s Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts<\/em> Editor’s Introduction “Introduction: Cultural Work” Brian Attebery One of the most useful tools for fantasy scholars seems at first to have little to do with the fantastic. It is the idea of cultural work, a phrase introduced in Jane Tompkins\u2019s revolutionary Sensational Designs (1985). In this book, Tompkins invites us to look at literature\u2014she is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":223,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-234","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234","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=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234\/revisions\/331"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h3>\n
\nTherese-M. Meyer<\/p>\n
\nKristin Noone<\/p>\n
\nDaniel Bautista<\/p>\n
\nTom O\u2019Connor<\/p>\n
\nOrion Ussner Kidder<\/p>\nReview Essay<\/h3>\n
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\nRev. by Cary Elza<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Stacie L. Hanes<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Jim Holte<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Kristen McDermott<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Stephanie Moss<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Thomas J. Morrissey<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Roger C. Schlobin<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Isabella van Elferen<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Jason P. Vest<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Monty Vierra<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"